Innovative approaches to rapid antibiotic resistance testing

Hello. My name is Dr. Robert Hammond. I'm a lecturer at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Today, I'm going to be taking you through a talk about the innovative approaches to rapid antibiotic resistance testing.

What is rapid AST or DST? In terms of this talk, AST and DST are the same thing. AST is antimicrobial susceptibility testing and DST is drug susceptibility testing. These come down to the same thing. Do excuse me if during the course of the talk I say drug, I will always mean antibiotic and we're talking about AST and DST today. So talking about susceptibility testing. That necessarily has us talking about antimicrobial resistance, of course, which I'll get into a little bit later on.

How fast is fast? This entire talk is about the rapidity of techniques and technologies to try and combat AMR, antimicrobial resistance, by testing with antimicrobial susceptibility testing. In April of 2022, EUCAST, which is a European group, who designates the effects of antibiotics for clinicians and for health care workers, defined rapidity as less than four hours in terms of a technology or a technique. Numerous studies have defined rapidity as equal to less than two hours for their various technologies. That's if they're promoting their own or if they're talking about others, and the Longitude Prize which has been going on for many years, and at time of recording is going to be announcing its winner very soon, called rapidity less than 30 minutes. Which is a tall order for anybody but let's see what we can get in the pattern literature available at time of recording. We see one of these patterns gives us results in six hours but frequently more than 48 hours for this particular technology. That's good at six hours, but it doesn't quite fall within our brackets for rapid there. Next one down says less than 12 hours from Helios. Again, interesting. I'm sure it's a wonderful technology, but unfortunately doesn't quite fall within our rapid time frame. Next one down here, a Phenotypic testing, we'll get into what that means later. Results in about 3.5 hours. That's good. That's getting into the realm of rapid for us and if it's always around 3.5 hours or less, that's excellent. Then this lower one has a fairly broad range of 5-90 minutes but is well within most of our definitions here for rapidity, especially that lower number of around five minutes. You can see within the technology available at time of recording and the ones coming through it in patent scanning, there is considerable scope and considerable range in the technology of how we talk about rapidity and what it means.