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No matter how fancy the equipment in a hospital is, no matter how educated and trained the personnel are, there are always diagnoses or incurable illnesses that the golden hand of medicine does not reach. One such illness is sepsis, the result of a rapid blood infection – a severe medical emergency where bacteria, viruses, or fungi invade the bloodstream and multiply.
Once someone has a blood infection, it isn’t incurable, yet it takes time to match the proper treatment. Doctors have to rely on traditional blood cultures. The method requires drawing blood and then waiting 24 to 72 hours for the microscopic amounts of bacteria to multiply enough to be detected and identified, as states Katarzyna Maria Dziubińska-Kühn.
Chemist and NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectroscopist Katarzyna Maria Dziubińska-Kühn, based at the National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics (KBFI) in Estonia, is leading a collaborative project with the University of Sunderland in England and TalTech in Estonia to develop rapid diagnostic methods for diseases with acute onset, such as bloodstream infections.
Dziubińska-Kühn’s research isn’t only limited to medical research, since her background is in engineering and not in medicine. She has also worked on chemistry matching the needs of electrical cars and in other fields. Dziubińska-Kühn emphasises that the interdisciplinary aspect of her work is what makes it interesting and fulfilling.
A revolutionary project
The current project that Dziubińska-Kühn and her team are working on is tackling blood infections. Getting a diagnosis and administering a proper antibiotic for a blood infection may even take as long as a week, as she states. It is not reasonable to prescribe a cocktail of antibiotics due to possible antibiotic resistance in the future.
The research group has designed a molecule that bacteria consume, and they can detect it in a patient sample instead of waiting for the bacteria to grow. As the bacteria metabolize the molecule, they produce measurable by-products. By measuring bacterial metabolism instead of bacterial growth, they can identify the bacteria in a blood sample much more quickly.
Dziubińska-Kühn states that the project still has two years ahead, but that as of now it looks very promising. They have been able to reduce the time period of giving the diagnosis from 24 hours or even a week to a mere six hours. Their machinery is home-built and it was designed by the engineers in the institute.
A major global health problem
Bloodstream infections are a major global health problem and are among the leading causes of premature death. They can affect anyone, regardless of where they live, including in developed countries such as Estonia.
The research group’s goal is to develop a method that can be implemented using equipment already available in most hospitals, particularly instruments that use magnetic fields. She states that rather than requiring hospitals to invest in expensive new technology, they aim to provide a solution that can be integrated into already existing machinery.
This approach makes the method more practical and increases its potential to be used in both developed and developing countries. “Every hospital that has a magnetic resonance technology could use this technique,” she adds.
Antibiotic resistance
Bacteria can eventually adapt to antibiotics which leads to antibiotic resistance. This means that antibiotics that were once effective may no longer be able to kill certain bacteria, because these antibiotics have been overused, making infections more difficult to treat. As this resistance continues to increase globally, it has proven itself as a serious public health challenge.
To treat a bacterial infection and to be successful in doing so, it is important to identify the exact bacterium that is causing the infection. After that, the antibiotic that the bacterium is most susceptible to, must be chosen. This is why providing the antibiotic as early as possible is crucial. And the research teams’ work aids with that.
The next step
An important next step for this research and technology is intellectual property protection through patenting, as she emphasises. Scientific publications are essential for communicating research findings but they often aren’t practical. A patent, on the other hand, protects the innovation as well as helping it reach the real world and have a real impact.
Commercial partners can help to enable the technology to be used on a larger scale, making it more available for more people. Let’s see where the project is in two years.
This article is written by Annette Maria Hermaküla. This article was funded by the European Regional Development Fund through Estonian Research Council.
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