First-of-Its-Kind Single-Cell Clinical Microbiology Platform Wins 2023 Disruptive Technology Award

Pattern Bioscience, Inc. (Austin, TX, USA) has won the 2023 Disruptive Technology Award for its ground-breaking single-cell microbiology technology at the AACC Annual Scientific Meeting. The Disruptive Technology Award competition from ADLM honors innovative testing solutions and disruptive technologies that enhance patient care via diagnostic performance or improved access to high-quality testing. The finalists demonstrated their technologies live at the Disruptive Technology Award session during the event, with the winner being chosen by expert judges and announced at the session's conclusion.

Pattern has designed a novel culture-free test that rapidly identifies infection-causing pathogens and assesses their susceptibility to antibiotics. The test utilizes a fusion of single-cell analysis and AI to directly evaluate individual bacterial cells' responses to antibiotics, aiding healthcare teams in making informed decisions about antimicrobial therapy. Unlike PCR or sequence-based methods that evaluate genetic targets linked to resistance, Pattern’s technology directly measures the response of bacterial cells to antibiotics, thereby determining exactly which agents can be employed for therapy. This process is similar to standard-of-care culture methods, but significantly faster.

The single-cell microbiology technology developed by Pattern is capable of testing directly from complex clinical specimens, including non-sterile body sites where normal microbiota often coexists with pathogens. This unique ability to test directly from polymicrobial specimens stems from its single-cell isolation approach. The technology bypasses the traditional agar plate-based colony isolation process by encapsulating individual bacterial cells (or colony-forming units) in isolated picoliter-volume "culture droplets," creating an array of single-cell isolates. This critical process separates the antibiotic response of each bacteria type in the sample, enabling Pattern to deconvolve the antibiotic susceptibilities of multiple bacterial species. As such, Pattern’s technology is the first and only emerging technology capable of comprehensively diagnosing pneumonia directly from a clinical specimen, leading to the FDA granting the company’s Pneumonia ID/AST Panel a Breakthrough Device Designation.

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