Transforming patient care with ultra-rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing

22 May 2023

Many current antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) technologies can bear fundamental limitations, including low speed, high variability, and poor access to methods close to the patient. In this video, Prof. Holger Rohde from the Institute of Medical Microbiology, Virology and Hygiene, Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf, discusses how he uses the QuickMIC^® from Gradientech to completely optimize laboratory diagnostic workflows and improve the communication of results to the clinician. Dr. Christer Malmberg, Chief Scientist at Gradientech, explains how this ultra-rapid AST system is designed to enable optimized AST to speed up time to result and delivery of optimized therapy for patients with infectious diseases.

This video was filmed at ECCMID 2023, Copenhagen.

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[Prof. Rohde] So my name is Holger Rohde. I'm working as a medical microbiologist at the University Medical Center in Hamburg. As a medical microbiologist, I'm primarily interested in improving diagnostics in the lab, and we have seen a lot of technical innovation that was mainly addressing in-lab problems and trying to optimize workflows within the lab.

But right now we will see that these technologies also broaden the spectrum of interest, moving us to the question how the speed within the lab can be translated into speeding up time to result and time to optimize therapy of patients with infectious diseases.

Looking at the market of ways to speed up susceptibility testing in the lab gives you an idea that there are a lot of different systems ranging from molecular diagnostics to phenotypic assays and having the...or being aware of the importance of emerging gram-negative, multi-resistant bacteria, we see the limitations of molecular assays, and therefore, we are convinced that the rapid phenotypic tests will make a difference.

And the QuickMIC system, owing to the speed and short time to result has enabled us to completely change our workflows within the lab and change our way how we communicate results to the clinician.

And we already see that this optimized way of diagnostics also changes treatment of patients, and we hope to see that in the future these changes will also translate into lives being saved by these technologies.

[Dr. Malmberg] My name is Christer Malmberg. I am the chief scientist at Gradientech AB. We have identified some fundamental problems with the current AST technologies. They are too slow, they have too high variability, and there's also poor access to methods where they're needed the most, which is closer to the patient.

So our aim is to introduce the fastest, most precise, and easy-to-use AST system on the market. So the QuickMIC system is a rapid, phenotypic, antibiotic susceptibility test, which means that we measure the susceptibility to antibiotics and you get a result, an MIC value which you can use when you want to know how to treat your patients.

[Prof. Rohde] For me, the most exciting thing is that microbiology will not only be a specialty that is focused on the lab, but a specialty that will be integrated into clinical pathways and pathways of patient management.

And there, I see the future that will be significantly supported by systems like the QuickMIC system enabling us to get back to the bedside as a medical microbiologist.