Blood Culture Test Optimizes Antimicrobial Therapy

A bacteriophage amplification platform enables early identification of Staphylococcus aureus and determination of antibiotic resistance or susceptibility.

The blood culture test enables clinicians to optimize therapy by identifying S. aureus directly from Gram-positive blood cultures and determine antibiotic susceptibility on the same day.

The KeyPath MRSA/MSSA Blood Culture Test can determine methicillin resistance (MRSA) or susceptibility (MSSA) of the bacteria far faster than standard antibiotic susceptibility testing. The test, which takes a little over five hours to get a result, was 98.9% accurate (178/180) for MRSA identification and 99.4% accurate (153/154) in determining MSSA within the organisms identified as S. aureus.

As many as half of all patients with S. aureus infections are initially prescribed inappropriate or suboptimal antibiotics before traditional test methods return information about the bacteria's antibiotic susceptibility. The KeyPath test provides crucial diagnostic information that enables doctors to prescribe the most appropriate antibiotics for a patient's infection up to two days sooner than is possible with current test methods.

The KeyPath MRSA/MSSA Blood Culture Test is a product of MicroPhage, Inc. (Longmont, CO, USA). The test, developed using MicroPhage's proprietary Bacteriophage Amplification Technology (BAT) platform, meets the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI; Wayne, PA, USA) and US Food and Drug Administration (FDA; Silver Springs, MD, USA) criteria.

Drew Smith, PhD, chief science officer at MicroPhage, said, "The MicroPhage BAT platform provides a phenotypic result that directly assesses the organism's response to an antibiotic. The platform can be extended to a broad range of bacterial pathogens and sample types thus enabling development of a long pipeline of clinically useful susceptibility tests and test panels."

Related Links:
MicroPhage Inc.
Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute
US Food and Drug Administration