From three days to 45 minutes – that’s a huge improvement when you’re a patient waiting for the correct treatment. A technique making it possible to test the antibiotic susceptibility of a bacterial infection in less than an hour has now been awarded the prestigious £8 million Longitude Prize in AMR. The quick test was developed by the company Sysmex Astrego, based on research in the Elflab.

At the beginning of the 18th century, British seafarers were troubled by the lack of accurate longitudinal information at sea. To encourage invention in this area, the government announced The Longitude Prize; a large sum of money was promised to anyone who could present a simple and practical method for the precise determination of a ship’s longitude.

Now, roughly 300 years later, in the face of accelerating antimicrobial resistance, the world faces another crippling shortcoming - the lack of fast susceptibility testing for bacterial infections. In 2014, the Longitude Prize was revived but this time, the goal was a rapid test for antibiotic resistance.

For ten years, researchers around the globe have participated in the challenge and now the winner has been revealed - The antibiotic susceptibility test developed by Sysmex Astrego. The company, first called Astrego Diagnostics, was founded in 2017 by Johan Elf and Özden Baltekin at Uppsala University together with the alumni Elias Amselem and Petter Hammar, and a few experienced engineers from the local diagnostics industry. Astrego was fully acquired by the Sysmex Corporation in 2022. Sysmex Astrego finalized the development of the test and brought it to the market.

What makes this test faster than the competition? The answer can be summarized in four different aspects:

1. The test measures the biological response, i.e. the change in growth rate, of the cells when exposed to the drug. The growth rate is measured by the length extension of individual bacteria. Many other tests rely on the cells to multiply before a response can be recorded, which takes time.
2. Measuring the growth rate of individual cells gives large measurement errors. These errors are reduced by averaging over many cells. The fluidic design makes it possible to measure the length extension of many individual bacteria fast.
3. The microfluidics design also allows for capturing and imaging exponentially growing cells directly from the sample. This means no time-consuming sample preparation or preculture is necessary.
4. The variation in growth rate between different bacterial isolates is reduced by normalizing the growth rate of treated cells with an untreated reference.

The Longitude Prize is a fantastic recognition of our work. We are grateful to the Wallenberg Foundation and ERC for funding the science behind this technology, but also to SSF for encouraging more applied work.

If you are curious about our work on fast AST, check out our latest preprint on TB diagnostics.

Read more about the Longitude Prize on AMR

Press release