Sepsis is the leading cause of hospital death with ~700K EU deaths annually. To treat a sepsis infection, we must identify the causative pathogens and determine their antibiotic susceptibility. However, existing blood culture testing is slow (days) and sepsis kills quickly (hours). Clinicians therefore initiate treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics. These are sub-optimal and can be harmful to some patients. Initiation of treatment without diagnostic results also leads to overuse of antibiotics, impacting antimicrobial resistance. Many have sought to address this challenge using direct from-blood (DfB) test methods, but have failed to address the real market need. SepsiSTAT is the world’s first DfB diagnostic platform able to deliver a credible alternative to blood culture testing, but with results in hours and not days. This enables a rapid targeting of antibiotic treatments with improved patient outcomes, greater healthcare efficiencies and reduced antibiotic use.

Momentum Bioscience was founded to develop rapid tests for clinical specimens within the hospital microbiology laboratory, supporting the global fight against antibiotic resistance and the need for improved antimicrobial stewardship. Sepsis (blood poisoning) kills more people than bowel, breast and prostate cancer combined but symptoms of sepsis are frequently non-specific, leading to a delay in diagnosis. The standard laboratory test for sepsis is blood culture, which detects a large range of germs that can be found in the patient’s blood but can sometimes take several days to give a result. Our study will look at the feasibility of detecting and categorising these germs in just 3 hours, helping doctors choose the right antibiotic for the patient more quickly. This project will explore new approaches to capturing and concentrating germs from blood so they can be detected using molecular technology already developed by Momentum.

Sepsis (blood poisoning) now kills more people in the UK than lung cancer. Symptoms of sepsis can often be confused with other problems such as fever caused by cancer therapy. Because it still takes up to five days to diagnose sepsis in the hospital laboratory, patients at risk are put on expensive front-line antibiotics until the lab gives a result. This leads to extensive overtreatment as 90% of these patients turn out not to have sepsis. Momentum Bioscience has developed a test to reliably identify negative patients in one day. The grant proposal is to develop an automated system for the lab to run this test on all blood samples it receives from patients suspected of sepsis. This could save 4 days unnecessary treatment, reduce hospital costs and reduce the pressure on antibiotic resistance. The new system will be developed and evaluated in hospital studies before launching as a final product in the UK, mainland Europe and the rest of the world.

The Company has developed a test allowing the hospital microbiology laboratory to rapidly detect bacterial and fungal infections in blood. Current methods usually take 1-3 days to tell if a blood specimen is positive and 5 days to report if it is negative. The new test provides both positive and negative results in 24 hours which helps to save hospital costs and unnecessary antibiotic use and will assist in difficult diagnoses. However the test takes 3 hours for a trained scientist to perform. This manual requirement makes it harder for a busy lab to fit the new test into its daily workflow The SMART project is intended to show proof of concept for an automated version of the test. Running the test on an instrument requires development of new methods for separating microorganisms from blood contaminants and this is a key risk factor in the project. It is intended that the final automated method will reduce the amount of hands on time required by lab staff to a matter of minutes and allow higher numbers of tests to be run per day with improved accuracy. Hospital microbiologists have said that making the test easier for the lab to run will make adoption much more likely and this is expected to boost sales significantly in the UK and worldwide. If the SMART proof of concept is successful the Company intends to complete development and launch the automated detection product as well as apply this automation to future products.

Awaiting Public Project Summary