Portable and High Throughput Platform for Screening of Phage Biobanks

Background

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 remained 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.

Technology Overview

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.

Illustration of the screening process for a bacterial isolate against a phage biobank using this platform can be found in .

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

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

Opportunity

McMaster University is seeking partners for technology licensing opportunities and research collaboration.