In the event that a patient is infected with a dangerous bacterial infection resistant to an antibiotic, doctors should find out about it as early as possible. The University of Washington has developed an electronic test that allows you to determine the resistance of microorganisms to drugs in less than 90 minutes.
Normally, to find out how resistant a bacterium is to certain antibiotics, it is necessary to take a culture sample from the patient, grow the required amount of material in the laboratory and conduct tests with antibiotics. This can take about two days or more, during which time the patient can be treated with antibiotics literally "at random" - later it may turn out that they are completely ineffective.
In search of a faster alternative for testing, scientists have developed technology to record the "electrochemical signal" emitted by a bacterium as it lives. If the sample is placed in an antibiotic-rich environment and the signal does not disappear, the bacterium is resistant to this drug. After that, doctors can test with another medicine or choose other methods of treatment, and this can be done in less than an hour and a half from the moment of taking the first test.
Although researchers have previously attempted such measurements, they were hampered by the fact that bacteria are unable to "transfer" electrons directly to the electrode. The team of scientists solved this problem by using a special chemical "mediator" that delivers electrons from the surface of the bacterium to an electron probe, where their effects are recorded by equipment.
The technology is already being successfully tested on common types of microorganisms tested for four types of antibiotics. Further plans include the refinement and commercialization of the technology; in the future, the results can be obtained within a few minutes.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Your comment and facebook share will be appreciated