A lab at London’s St Thomas’ Hospital is designing the new DNA sequencing technology, which it hopes will be available within a year.
Leading microbiology expert Professor Jonathan Edgeworth, who is helping evaluate the equipment, said: “This is the most promising thing to help tackle the problem of antibiotic resistance we’ve seen.
“We hope the test will revolutionise the treatment of infections by helping doctors make better and quicker decisions, helping save lives as well as preventing inappropriate prescribing.”
A genome sequencer the size of a mobile phone uses electrical currents to map and identify strands of DNA in real time.
These are matched to a library of bacterial sequences to show which infection has been acquired and the resistance genes present, allowing doctors to give the most appropriate antibiotic treatment.
Currently, diagnosing infections can take three to five days.
Because doctors must often give antibiotics while waiting for lab results, they can pick wrong treatments, making bacteria more likely to develop drug resistance.
Prof Edgeworth said: “We are testing this new bacterial DNA detection device to see if it can tell us within a few hours which antibiotics will work best for patients with serious infections.
Once we can show this works, we will then need to find a path through to routine use.”
Dr Alka Saxena of the biomedical research centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ said: “The speed at which this technology provides DNA sequence information is really exciting.”
The research will be conducted by scientists at Guy’s and St Thomas’ and private laboratory company Viapath. Offi cial figures show antibiotic resistance claims 5,000 British lives a year, but experts claim it is at least double that. Globally the problem is thought to kill 700,000 a year – one person a minute
