Pilot Study Completed for MRSA Identification

MRSA causes infections that are resistant to most antibiotics, leaving few choices for effective therapy. Since its first recognized appearance in 1961, MRSA has spread to become the dominant type of hospital-acquired "Staph” infection in most countries. According to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, a MRSA variant has also become the most common cause of community-acquired skin and soft tissue infection seen in hospital emergency departments in the United States.

Standard antibiotic susceptibility testing now requires 24-48 hours to report a result. This is too late to help the physician assure adequate initial therapy. The BACcel-1.0 system is being developed by Accelr8 (Denver, CO, USA) to identify in less than 8 hours whether bacteria in a specimen belong to one of the three major categories of highly resistant pathogens. It is this system that will be presented in May, 2007.

The company estimates that S aureus is responsible for approximately 25% of life-threatening infections in the intensive care unit (ICU). In most cities, approximately two-thirds of such infections are caused by MRSA. For critically ill patients who contract a hospital-acquired infection, the physician needs to know quickly whether or not highly resistant bacteria are the cause. A change in therapy as soon as 24 hours after starting inadequate therapy fails to improve outcomes. Therefore, the physician must minimize the risk of resistant organisms causing failure of the initial therapy.

According to David Howson, Accelr8's president, "We're making rapid progress in our studies on identifying organisms that belong in any of the three major drug resistance categories that are most difficult to treat in the ICU. Each of the three categories requires a two-stage study. We expect to complete expanded studies on large collections of bacterial strains and present them to the medical and scientific communities this year.”

"As far as we can determine, we remain alone in developing a practical diagnostic solution that eliminates bacterial culturing. Within the diagnostics industry, recent acquisitions and new product announcements related to MRSA address important applications in screening carriers of dangerous bacteria, but not in diagnosing active infections. The urgent problem of delayed diagnosis of actual infections remains unaddressed. Most of the new rapid methods for screening depend on specific conditions, such as the existence of a single gene responsible for resistance. In contrast, our methods allow direct adaptation to the multiple species and complex mechanisms of resistance necessary to support clinical diagnoses. Even so, the speed of our methods even exceeds that of most rapid screening tests.” Mr. Howson concluded.


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