A new technology for rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing – DAMOCLES

Increase of antimicrobial resistance is a major public health problem. This problem, which mainly concerns Gram-negative bacteria (GNB), occurs in humans as well as in animals and in the environment. Faced with this overall increase in antibiotic resistance levels, the clinician who suspects a bacterial infection must institute a so-called probabilistic antibiotic therapy pending the microbiological results obtained within 36-48 hours. He must therefore choose between a broad-spectrum antibiotic therapy which is likely to be effective in treating the infection but with the side effect of exerting a strong antibiotic selection pressure, and a narrower antibiotic therapy but at the risk of being ineffective in treating the infection of his/her patient. Faced with this dilemma, research is currently being carried out with the aim of reducing the time required to obtain the antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) and thus allow the clinician to institute targeted and appropriate antibiotic therapy more quickly. It is in this context that our project is situated.

The goal of the DAMOCLES project is to use an innovative technology to reduce the time it takes to get an AST to adapt antibiotic therapy in less than 24 hours. A preliminary study conducted on strains of Escherichia coli with different antibiotics has shown that this technology can detect the effect of the antibiotic after only 2 hours of incubation. This preliminary study enabled the deposit of a patent in early April 2020.

The DAMOCLES project aims at extending this preliminary study to a large panel of bacterial species and antibiotics, this will define the scope of the test. After a period of research laboratory validation, it is planned to implement the technology in a medical bacteriology laboratory and to carry out tests on routine bacterial strains.

Due to the universal nature of the AST, this project has a great potential for industrial development. Note that at the same time, the DAMOCLES project will be based on the creation of a spin-off dedicated to the development of new devices specifically designed for medical diagnosis in bacteriology (CE marking, medical device).