Abstract

Point of Care Detection of Antimicrobial Resistance with Impedance Biosensors

Till Bachmann, Professor/Reader, University of Edinburgh

Antibiotic resistance is a major challenge for the modern healthcare system and increases the global burden of infectious diseases. It causes healthcare costs and productivity losses of at least 1.5 billion euros each year in Europe alone. Leading international organisations including the World Health Organisation (WHO), the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as well as the European Commission and many national governments identified this as an urgent problem which demands immediate action. Our ability to treat infections that once were believed to be under control is now at risk and a ‘post-antibiotic era’ is becoming a real possibility for the 21st century. Diagnostics could help reducing this threat but current standard methods are too slow and lack information depth to enable tailored therapy decisions. To overcome this limitation molecular tools are developed for rapid in vitro diagnostics of infectious diseases. In an ideal scenario such devices would be available at point of care to make therapy decisions at the site of the patient possible. Here, we report the successful development of an electrochemical biosensor platform based on electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) for label-free molecular diagnostics covering a wide range of targets from small molecules over proteins to different types of nucleic acids. Nucleic acid targets which have been successfully detected with the EIS platform range from short artificial targets over PCR products directed against several antibiotic resistance genes to genomic DNA and ribosomal RNA (rRNA) for direct amplification free bacterial species identification. These EIS based biosensors provide a highly suitable portfolio for the development of molecular diagnostic tests which can be performed at point of care. The implications of such development will be discussed in the context of the soaring problem of antimicrobial resistance.