Rapid Test for Precision Treatment of Microbial Infection
Supervisors:
Prof Michael Barrett, School of Infection & Immunity
Dr Chunxiao Hu, James Watt School of Engineering
Summary:
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) threatens to reverse the great strides in medicine that have accrued in the last 70 years. With diseases such as typhoid, cholera and tuberculosis becoming commonplace, routine operations may become impossible due to the risk of infection and even childbirth will revert to the dangerous process it once was. Detecting AMR is critical to our ability to combat the problem. Currently two broad areas permit detection of drug-resistant bacteria. Firstly, phenotypic tests that follow the ability of bacteria to grow in the presence of antibiotics or not are widely used. Secondly, genetic tests that seek genes known to be associated with resistance have become more common as such genes are discovered and collated in sequence databases enabling detection. Recent advances in electronic engineering and microfluidics offer the potential to create portable devices that can detect antimicrobial resistant bacteria in a fraction of the time required using conventional methodologies. Here we propose to exploit microfluidic methods of sorting bacteria and electronic methods to detect viability of bacteria in the presence of antimicrobials to produce a new generation of antimicrobial resistance detecting devices that could underpin global efforts to combat this problem.