By the year 2050 as many as 10 million lives could be lost through the
inability to use what we now have as common antibiotics. And furthermore, in
the O'Niell report, one of the recommendations was that antibiotics
should no longer be prescribed without a fast diagnostic tool that will inform
the doctor as to whether or not they are required.
In our lab at the University of Southampton, we do research at the
interface of physical sciences, engineering, and life sciences.
Our interest in diagnostics stemmed from a collaboration that we have with Public
Health England, principally around trying to develop a tool that will allow us to
improve the diagnostics of urinary tract infections and whether the bacteria that
are present in UTIs carry genes that confer resistance to antimicrobials or
antibiotics.
The technology that we use was developed by Sharp, and it borrows
the same principles that are used in mobile phone displays. In those displays
you have little transistors. Those are used to control the images. We use those same transistors
to control the movement and position of droplets in our devices.
We call this 'digital microfluidics'.
Each electrode, in theory, can have one droplet and we have
around 17,000 electrodes on these devices, so you can imagine the number of
reactions or any sort of biological assay you can do on these devices.
in terms of the work that we're doing with RPA; one of the key advantages of
recombinase polymerase amplification is its robustness to sample matrix. So, in
principle, you could use that RPA amplification for a number of different
assay platforms in a number of different scenarios.
The good thing about using RPA is that it's isothermal, so you just need to maintain the entire
device 37 degrees. We've used these devices to run RPA assays where we've
dispensed droplets, mixed them under direct software control, the reagents with
the sample, and we've been able to detect a single copy of antimicrobial resistant
gene present in the DNA sample within 15 minutes.
We've used our platform to identify three different genes; some of the commonest genes that confer
antimicrobial resistance to bacteria. The goal would
really be to have a diagnostic test that the GP could use, in a few minutes, to
identify whether there really is an infection and which is the most
appropriate antibiotic to prescribe.
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