Fast assay for pathogen identification and characterisation - Prospective Study

Principle Investigator: prof. dr. Inge Gyssens, Researcher: Valentino D'Onofrio

Sepsis, or blood poisoning, is a systemic inflammatory response to an infection in the bloodstream. It has a serious course, with a mortality rate of up to 80% in the intensive care unit. It is important that the infection is treated as soon as possible with the appropriate antibiotics. Ideally, identification of the pathogen by using blood cultures determines the choice of antibiotics. This identification takes 2 days to complete, and even 5 days to confirm negative results. Also, only 30% of the cases are confirmed by blood cultures. As a result, a broad spectrum of antibiotics is prescribed, which increases the selection pressure and thus the resistance of pathogens. Faster and more sensitive techniques are urgently needed. Molecular techniques can help to solve this problem. However, the existing commercial tests have serious deficits. They are not sensitive enough and it takes too long until the result is available. This project will develop a new system to identify pathogens, but will also study the susceptibility of the different pathogens to antibiotics, and this in a faster and more sensitive way than done by blood cultures. This new and innovative system, based on DNA probe technology, will work fully automatically and start directly from the sample taken from the patient, skipping the difficult culture step. This part of the study aims at determining the functioning of this system. Blood samples of patients with sepsis will be collected prospectively, to test the system for its sensitivity, specificity and accuracy.