Industry support for exciting new AMR diagnostics research by Southampton team

There is an urgent need to develop easy-to-use, sensitive tests that can detect drug resistance at the bedside so that appropriate, potentially life-saving antibiotics can be prescribed without delay.

A University of Southampton team led by NAMRIP member, Professor Hywel Morgan, has developed a cost-effective, highly sensitive and portable digital microfluidic device that exploits Recombinase Polymerase Amplification(RPA) and on-chip fluorescence to quantitatively detect antimicrobial resistance genes in DNA extracted from patient samples. The devices can control tiny reaction droplets on its surface using electric fields and carry out an automatable diagnosis process. The team hopes that the platform could form the basis of an easy-to-use, disposable device that hospitals or community doctors could use to identify multiple antibiotic resistance genes in patients with serious infections, so that the optimum treatment can be started as soon as possible. The researchers have published their work, which is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Rapid detection of infectious agents at point of triage (PoT), II-ES-0511-21002. Details of the journal papers are below.

 The team has also developed a device that combines semiconductor TFT nanoribbon sensor and RPA biochemistry to offer ultra-fast diagnosis based on pH electrical readout system. They claim that this approach provides even faster, more sensitive detection than conventional fluorescence using exo-probes for quantifying the amplified target DNA. In tests the technology was capable of achieving some results in under three minutes.