ASM 2023

Does Speed Matter? The Financial and Economic Benefits of Rapid AST

Speakers: Thomas Kirn, MD PhD Dept. of Pathology and Medicine Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School | Eric Stern, PhD CTO, Selux Diagnostics

Despite the importance of antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) to infectious diseases patient care, current AST systems limit result speed, accuracy, and consistency. This forces an over-reliance on broad-spectrum antibiotics and contributes to antimicrobial resistance, the next global health crisis. While multiple rapid AST technologies are under development, they are restricted to bloodstream infections, so they cannot address most hospitalized patients with other infections. Join us to explore how rapid AST results lead to precise and fast antibiotic treatment, improved clinical outcomes, and reduced healthcare costs.

Download PowerPoint

IDWeek 2023

How new rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing technologies for blood cultures change the paradigm of patient care

Speakers: Romney Humphries, PhD, D(ABMM), M(ASCP) | Vincent Streva, PhD, D(ABMM)

Bloodstream infection is a medical emergency that necessitates prompt administration of appropriate antibiotics. Clinical microbiology laboratories perform antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) of isolates recovered from blood cultures to inform treatment decisions. Traditional AST involves the subculture of organisms from positive blood culture bottles, followed by AST, typically using a legacy AST system testing or disk diffusion method, which commonly takes 18 or more hours to provide results. Rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing (rAST) technologies have been developed in recent years, eliminating the subculture step, preparing the samples directly from positive blood cultures, and effectively reducing the time-to-result by several hours to one day. The presenters will discuss the importance of rAST, the clinical and financial benefits of rAST for blood cultures and septic patients, and the importance of using current breakpoints to report susceptibility results.

Download PowerPoint

Sepsis Alliance 2023

Changing the paradigm of patient care with new rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing technologies

Speakers: Thomas Kirn, MD PhD Dept. of Pathology and Medicine Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School | James S. Lewis II, PharmD, FIDSA

Bloodstream infection is a medical emergency that necessitates prompt administration of appropriate antibiotics.  Clinical microbiology laboratories perform antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) of isolates recovered from blood cultures to inform treatment decisions. Traditional AST involves the subculture of organisms from positive blood culture bottles, followed by AST, typically using a legacy AST system testing or disk diffusion method, which commonly takes 18 or more hours to provide results.   Rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing (rAST) technologies have been developed in recent years, eliminating the subculture step, preparing the samples directly from positive blood cultures, and effectively reducing the time-to-result by several hours to one day.  The presenters will discuss the importance of rAST, the clinical and financial benefits of rAST for blood cultures and septic patients, and the importance of using current breakpoints to report susceptibility results.

ASM 2024

Rapid AST is here to stay: Multi-site comparison of performance and time-to-results of rapid and legacy AST Systems with “gold standard” methods.

Speakers: Dr. Patricia (Trish) Simner, Johns Hopkins PhD, D(ABMM), Dr. Andrew Clark, UTSW, PhD, D(ABMM),  Dr. John Fissel, TriCore Reference Laboratories
Ph.D. D(ABMM), M(ASCP)CM

Summary: Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) has been routinely used to guide Abx treatment. Recently, the newly developed rapid AST platforms have substantially decreased time-to-result for AST, allowing faster actionable results for the treating physician. However, due to cost, complexity, and the need for a reference Broth Microdilution Method (BMD) methodology, data benchmarking for these platforms’ performance is lacking.

This study is the first to compare the clinical performance of the Vitek 2, MicroScan, Phoenix, Selux, and Kirby Bauer methods against the triplicate reference Broth Microdilution Method (BMD) using approximately 600 banked isolates and CDC-AR bank samples at multiple clinical laboratories in the US. The clinical accuracy and time-to-results are calculated for each system. The data demonstrates the systems’ performance under field conditions and points to areas for attention when relying on the results for the platforms to guide Abx treatment.