Abstract

Bacteriophages continue to gain regulatory approval for human therapeutic use, as well as antimicrobial use in food and agricultural settings against antibiotic-resistant bacteria, resulting in a clear need for rapid susceptibility profiling of bacterial isolates against large, decentralized phage biobanks.
The current gold standard in phage susceptibility testing, which has remined unchanged for over a century, is the culture method, which can take from overnight to several days. The challenge is compounded by the lack of a global phage biobank, a reality that may persist for the foreseeable future, making phage antimicrobial use reliant on decentralized phage biobanks around the world.

Researchers at McMaster have developed a high throughput, point-of-use platform technology that allows for packaging and stabilization of bacteriophage biobanks along with the detection biochemistry, enabling rapid (as fast as 30 min) susceptibility profiling for a bacterial isolate of interest in a one-pot format.

Applications

• Stabilization of large phage biobanks in solid form allowing for storage and shipping at room temperature.
• Rapid, culture-free, phage susceptibility screening assays for target bacteria against phage biobanks.
• Reformatting of phage biobanks and thus decreasing footprint and storage space and the need for specialized storage infrastructure.
• Enabling entire phage biobanks to be shipped around the world to be used and rapidly screened at point of need.

Benefits

• Decreased storage and shipment cost, thus increasing accessibility to phage antimicrobials, which is critical in healthcare settings and highly beneficial in other sectors.
• Stabilization of phage biobanks and assay components in the form of a solid tablet, at room temperature.
• Easy implementation of technology at point of use for rapid screening with little infrastructure or training, in any part of the world.
• Enhancing duplication and sharing of phage libraries.