Antibiotic susceptibility diagnostics
In 2017, we spun out the company Astrego Diagnostics to develop the methods described in (Baltekin et al . 2017) into a diagnostics test. The technology makes it possible to capture individual bacterial cells and measure their growth rate in real time.
Four different components contribute to the speed of the assay:
- The growth rate is measured by the length extension of individual bacteria rather than waiting for them to multiply.
- Measurement errors for the growth rate of individual cells are reduced by averaging over many, i.e. 100-1000, cells. The fluidic design makes it possible to measure the length extension of many individuals fast.
- The microfluidic design also allows for capturing and imaging exponentially growing cells directly from the sample.
- The variation in growth rate between different bacterial isolates is reduced by normalizing the growth rate of treated cells with an untreated reference.
Removing any one of these features would make the assay slower.
The company was acquired by the Sysmex Corporation in 2022, to finalize development and production.
