By David Graff, AAU Communication and Public Affairs
Photo: Trine Reinholt Andersen, AAU Innovation

Blood poisoning is a disease that occurs when microorganisms, most often bacteria, infect the bloodstream. To survive blood poisoning, the patient needs the correct antibiotic treatment within a short time, depending on which bacteria is involved.

This is where the new diagnostic method comes into play: Currently, it takes one to three days to identify the bacteria, whereas the new method can accomplish this task in just six hours. Based on DNA sequencing, the method captures and decodes DNA from deceased bacteria in the bloodstream.

"It's a 'needle-in-a-haystack' scenario because the bacterial DNA constitutes a very small portion of the total amount. We have developed methods to enrich the bacterial DNA and algorithms to decode the signal," explains PhD student Morten Eneberg Nielsen.

Hospitals are already on board

The DNA method has been tested in a clinical study at Aalborg University Hospital in collaboration with doctors from the Clinical Microbiology Department. The researchers demonstrated that the method is significantly better than the current method, which relies on cultivating the bacteria from the bloodstream.

"Swift diagnosis of sepsis is paramount as it enables us to adjust antibiotic treatment, thereby enhancing the patient's chances of survival. The developed method has yielded promising results and could potentially revolutionize systemic infection diagnosis," says Hans Linde Nielsen, Research Lead Physician at the Clinical Microbiological Department.

According to Professor Mads Albertsen, the method offers another advantage:

"In addition to the method being significantly faster, we have shown that it can diagnose twice as many patients as the reference method. There is not much research left before the method is ready to make a difference in hospitals," he explains.

The grant paves the way for commercial use

Making a practical difference is precisely the goal of the Innoexplorer grant, which will be used to initiate regulatory validation so that the method can be approved for clinical use. Once the Innoexplorer grant expires, the remaining work to bring the method to hospitals will be carried out by the researchers' spinoff company, SeeQ diagnostics.

The team behind the new technology expects to publish the research results within six months, and if all goes well, the new diagnostic will hit the market within the next three to five years.