Editor’s note: Before clinicians can identify the pathogen causing sepsis and begin targeted antimicrobial therapy, they must wait for blood culture results, which typically take 2 to 3 days. However, a study published in Nature demonstrates that a novel ultra-rapid testing technique under development may provide antimicrobial susceptibility test (AST) results on the same day, potentially eliminating the need for blood cultures.This technology involves magnetic nanoparticles coated with synthetic plasma peptides that can bind to bacteria in whole blood. Magnetism is used to separate the bacteria bound to the nanoparticles, and a portion of the sample undergoes rapid genetic testing. The remaining bacteria are quickly cultured, and with the newly developed detection method, bacterial sensitivity to different antibiotics can be determined using only a small number of bacterial cells.
Researchers conducted a clinical trial in South Korea, comparing this new detection method with the standard blood culture process. The study was validated in 190 hospitalized patients with suspected infections, including those with hematologic malignancies.
The results showed a 100% match rate for pathogen identification. In 8 positive cases, AST was retrospectively performed on 6 clinical isolates, revealing a 94.90% (93/98) concordance rate between the novel method and traditional AST classification.
From the initial blood processing and culturing, the average theoretical turnaround time for the new method was 13±2.53 hours. This suggests that the turnaround time for susceptibility analysis reports could be shortened by more than 40 to 60 hours.
The researchers highlighted that reducing diagnostic time could lower the risk of sepsis-related mortality and minimize the unnecessary use of broad-spectrum antibiotics.
