When Özden Baltekin joined the Elf lab in 2012, the preliminary title in his study plan read “Phenotypic diversity among isogenic bacteria in response to antibiotics”. This project is still not finished. From the results in other projects, we know that there is significant diversity among isogenic bacteria in response to antibiotics, but that’s a different story. This post is about Özden defending a thesis on the 27th of March 2026 entitled “30-Minute Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing at the Point-of-Care using Nanofluidics.” Why did the topic change, and why did it take 14 years? This is the story about a student, his supervisors, and £8M worth of carrots:

A Most Excellent Tragedy (or Comedy) of Science and Gold

Dramatis Personae

Ozzy the Knight - A young scholar, bold of mind and word
Elrond - The Lore Master, keeper of deep wisdom and elegant wine
Brother Dan - A merry friar and, oddly, co‑supervisor of Ozzy the Knight, sharp of eye for royal decrees
A Company of Eastern Merchants - Masters of order, seal, and ledger

Act I - Of Noble Vision and Fine Design

Elrond:

Attend me now, good Knight, whose sharpened wit
Hath proved itself in riddles dark and deep.
Long have I dreamed a project rare and fair,
A thing of beauty, subtle, complex wrought,
Where thought entwines with thought in measured grace
A scheme not born of haste, but intellect.

Ozzy the Knight:

My lord, thy vision fires my fervent soul.
I’ll shape the code as poets shape their verse;
Each study clean, each datapoint entwined,
A model fit to test the minds of gods.

They set to work, and lo, their tool is wrought. Exact for that which Elrond long foresaw.

Act II - Enter the Friar With News of Gold

Brother Dan:

God save thee both! Hold, hold! Thy musings pause!
I bring a writ, sealed fast by royal hand:
Whoe’er can forge a tool that swift shall gauge
The growth of creatures small, nay, very small!
In blinking time, shall claim a sack of gold
So vast it bends the spine that bears it home.

Ozzy the Knight:

Gold, sayst thou? Gold?

Elrond (aside):

This smells of haste… and grant-mad kings.

Brother Dan:

Aye, gold! And glory too! The court doth roar
For metrics quick, for numbers clean and tight.
Philosophy, they’ll pardon, if it pays.

The Knight looks to Elrond. Elrond looks away. Then slowly nods.

Elrond:

Our principles may yet survive the chase.
Let us but bend them, briefly, to this end.

Exeunt omnes.

Act III - Of Trials Strange and Labours Vast

Knight:

O cursed parameter! Thou mock’st my care!
What devil set thee floating free of bounds?

Elrond:

Press on, dear Knight. Recall our former grace.
Though elegance now bleeds, we march for gold.

Brother Dan:

Courage! Each pivot point brings fortune nigh!
The graph descends! The metric runs full speed!
At last, triumphant, they behold their tool!
It measures growth with lightning’s haste.

Act IV - The Decree Fulfilled, the Prize Withheld

First Merchant:

Good sirs, we honour thy ingenious craft.
Yet ere the gold be giv’n, one point stands firm:
The framework, forms, compliance, stamped accord,
was filed by us, with signatures in triplicate.

Second Merchant:

The purse, by law, attends the paperwork.

Ozzy the Knight:

The… paperwork?

Elrond (with dawning horror):

They have not fought the dragon
They have befriended it.

Brother Dan (softly):

I fear, my friends, the gold is theirs, not ours.

The Merchants bow. Exit, bearing the sack.

Act V - A Gentle Reckoning

Ozzy the Knight:

What lesson lies beneath this strange defeat?

Elrond:

That speed alone ne’er triumphs over sense;
That vision lost is costly to reclaim.

Brother Dan:

And that who rules the forms may rule the field.
They share a rueful laugh.

Elrond:

Come, Knight. Let us return to finer work.
Gold fades, but beauty born of thought endures.
Exeunt, as the lights of learning glow once more.

Finis

And then, in the end, Özden got his PhD. He returned to the Ivory Tower for a March afternoon in the sign of Ganesha, but beneath his academic robe could be glimpsed the hem of a business suit.

In his thesis work, Özden addresses the so-called diagnostic void; because current susceptibility testing is too slow, clinicians rely on educated guesses rather than evidence when prescribing antibiotics. His research shows that the long wait for antibiotic test results isn’t inevitable. Bacteria don’t need days to reveal whether an antibiotic is working since their response begins within minutes. The bottleneck has been technological: traditional tests look for macroscopic bacterial growth, which is slow. By watching what happens at the level of individual cells, Özden demonstrates that susceptibility can be determined almost immediately.

Using a tiny “nanofluidic” chip and sensitive phase-contrast microscopy, the method traps bacteria and tracks their growth in real time. If an antibiotic is effective, growth slows or stops within minutes. With this approach, called FASTest, the correct antibiotic can be identified in just 30 minutes.

Most impressively, this research has already made the leap from the lab to the clinic. The fully automated PA-100 AST System has been recognized with the prestigious Longitude Prize on Antimicrobial Resistance. By shifting focus from bacterial populations to single cells, this work closes the diagnostic gap, paving the way for faster, more precise treatments and a powerful new tool in the fight against antibiotic resistance.

Read Özdens’s thesis here