Key Role Of Diagnostics In Fighting Antibiotic Resistance
Microbiology market in India is rapidly transforming and renewed interests in recent years due to the growing antibiotics resistance threats. The traditional delays in microbiology testing are significantly reduced by rapid microbiology solutions like BacT/ALERT for rapid blood culture, VITEK MS (Maldi-ToF), and VITEK for rapid identification (ID) and antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST). The increasing awareness of biomarkers like Procalcitonin in sepsis management has further improved the diagnostics speed of the microbiology lab. The next generation blood culture system i.e. BacT/ALERT VIRTUO is new standard in blood culture detection, which has further reduced the turnaround time with isothermal incubation and improved workflow with virtually zero hands-on time with precision robotics.
The automated ID/AS systems, VITEK, provide faster ID/AST (sensitive, intermediate or resistant) and provide the clinically important information like MIC value of tested panel of drugs, intrinsic-resistance patterns to avoid therapeutic failure and built in artificial intelligence (advanced expert system) to detect resistance patterns accurately. The connectivity and integration of microbiology solution with middleware systems like Myla has great potential to revolutionize the microbiology practices with the automated generation of epidemiology reports, drug vs bug reports separated by sample type and by hospital departments’, lab work flow optimization, monitor and reduce contamination rate etc.
The rapid identification of the bacterium responsible for an infection and the antibiotics effective against this bacterium can have a direct impact on a patient’s survival. Clinicians are becoming increasingly reliant on information from microbiology laboratories, as resistance to antibiotics makes therapeutic decisions more complex. Therefore, a rapid microbiology test allows physicians to choose the appropriate treatment and avoid the inappropriate use of antibiotics.
At bioMerieux, we rely on our long-standing expertize in microbiology, while integrating emerging technologies. We focus on reducing the time to results, developing new reagents to expand the range of bacteria that can be detected by our systems, and identify resistant bacteria, creating tests to analyze the susceptibility of bacteria to new antibiotics launched by the pharmaceutical industry, automating the microbiology lab, and strengthening connectivity within laboratories.
