Every year, 1.7 million Americans are evaluated for sepsis - and too many die while waiting days for the correct antibiotic. Imagine a one-day-old baby having to wait twice as long as they have been alive to receive accurate treatment. Or a cancer patient with bad immunity receiving 3 random antibiotics that might or might not work. This is a huge problem and I had an idea on how to fix it.
Every product in the market relies on identifying the bacteria to know what kills it. We thought, why care what the antibiotic is if you know what is killing it? We can do that by detecting the metabolic rate of the bacteria rather relying on phenotypic or genotypic methods--and, believe it or not, by mimicking the digestive system of mosquitoes.
I have a PhD in mechanical engineering with a focus on blood mechanics. Prior to my PhD I did customer discovery for 7 years. One day (my first day on a jet ski!) I got attacked by mosquitoes and had to rush home. The next day I went to the lab where I got bit by a mosquito again. I looked at the bite and noticed a sparkle on the bite spot. I looked it up and realized it was my blood plasma because mosquitoes urinate the plasma after digesting the red blood cells. This is exactly what I had been trying to do for years. I mimicked the digestive system of the mosquito and I got the missing piece of the product.
Astek’s first product will be the Eugris, a benchtop analyzer that can identify the presence of a bacterial infection in the blood and then perform antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) of the bacterium in one hour. To accomplish this, a microfluidics device removes the blood cells from the plasma that would contain bacteria and adds resazurin, a fluorescence indicator. These steps take 25 minutes. In the presence of live bacteria, resazurin is reduced to resorufin, which is higher in fluorescence, by reacting with NADH, a ubiquitous intermediate in the metabolic process. The sample is monitored fluorometrically for 15 minutes, and metabolic activity is shown by an increase in fluorescence. The technique has been shown capable of detecting bacterial infection at a level of 10 CFU/mL (colony-forming-units). Antibiotic susceptibility can be assessed by incubating the plasma with antibiotics, where ineffective antibiotics fail to reduce metabolic activity while effective antibiotics diminish metabolic activity.
We have a prototype in testing in a clinical setting. Our initial target market will be clinical labs tasked with performing diagnostic tests for patients suspected of sepsis or septic shock. For these patients, rapid initiation of the correct antibiotic therapy is crucial: every hour of delay increases mortality by 7-8%. Currently, the gold standard for AST relies on blood culture, and takes 2-7 days to deliver results to the clinician. Most patients don't have that long.