SBIR-STTR Award

Multidrug-resistant organisms (MDRO) are increasingly omnipresent in the healthcare settings of the public and military. Pathogens of interest in particular are those in the ESKAPEE group. As the prevalence of MDRO has increased, the number of new antibiotics to treat these infections has decreased. This has caused the rise of organisms resistant to all known antibiotics. To solve this, bacteriophage have been suggested as a treatment route for MDRO. Bacteriophage are highly specific. This is both a blessing and a burden as bacteriophage will continue to infect an MDRO for an extended time, but it might not infect a similar species or strain. Isolating bacteriophage has historically been a months-long, labor intensive, and expensive process. We propose to develop a portable device for phage hunting that removes the labor, the time, and the expense of the current process through automation. The device will allow the user to input their sample, input their bacterial target, and collect sterile, lytic phage cocktail in <4 hrs. This is a dramatic reduction in the time (<4 hrs vs weeks/months), cost (est <$100/target vs thousands), and labor (<5 mins vs weeks/months) to perform a phage hunt for a phage cocktail for phage therapies.

Multidrug-resistant organisms (MDRO) are increasingly omnipresent in the healthcare settings of the public and military. Pathogens of interest in particular are those in the ESKAPEE group. As the prevalence of MDRO has increased, the number of new antibiotics to treat these infections has decreased. This has caused the rise of organisms resistant to all known antibiotics. To solve this, bacteriophage have been suggested and used as a treatment route for MDRO. Bacteriophage are highly specific and as a result, isolating them has historically been a months-long, labor intensive, and high-cost process. We propose to revolutionize this process by developing a portable device for phage hunting that removes the labor, time, and expense of the current process. This will be done in four steps: 1) purify the environmental sample; 2) concentrate phage lysate; 3) culture lysate with target bacteria; and 4) purify screened phage lysate. This will be done automatically with no user intervention required except adding and retrieving the sample. The market for this is quite large as rapid, inexpensive phage isolation will allow phage therapy against more MDRO, phage detection of environmental bacteria, and diagnosis of difficult to diagnose, low concentration bacteria. This simple method to screen phage against bacteria will be usable by hospitals, military personnel, and public health professionals to combat MDRO.