The newly created research consortium “Very Fast Antibiotic Resistance Diagnostics” at Uppsala University has been awarded 50 million Swedish crowns within the program Agenda 2030 Research Centers (SSF-ARC). Four Swedish consortia got to share a total of 200 million crowns.

The goals of the project include reducing morbidity and mortality in human and animal infections, reducing antibiotic use and resistance development, extending antibiotic life, and achieving better clinical trials of new antibiotics with lower costs.

By capturing bacteria directly from patient blood in a microfluidic chamber and measuring the growth of individual cells optically, we obtain a measure of antibiotic sensitivity. We combine this method with species identification based on artificial intelligence, advanced image analysis, and in situ DNA sequencing to develop a comprehensive diagnostic tool. Using this tool, we can determine which bacterial species caused the infection and obtain a resistance profile.

The time from the sampling of patient blood to response should be one to four hours.