Infectious diseases are among the most frequent causes of death worldwide. To ensure rapid, individual, appropriate and targeted patient care, especially against the background of the emergence and spread of new and (multi)-resistant pathogens, rapid diagnostics is essential. Established methods in routine diagnostics are often culture-based and take up to 72 h to complete. Light-based methods offer great potential to detect a broad spectrum of pathogens and their resistances in a reasonable amount of time and at a reasonable cost, in addition to high specificity and accuracy. In the InfectoXplore project, a phenotypic Raman spectroscopic diagnostic platform is being researched that enables the identity and resistogram of bacterial pathogens to be determined from (early) positive blood cultures. The outlined project addresses the area of technological solutions for on-site diagnostics/analytics of the InfectoGnostics research agenda. In particular, making photonic technologies available for the development of rapid and non-contact test methods plays an important role. InfectoXplore also addresses the issues of sample handling and pre-analytics, e.g. to enable contamination-free, automated liquid handling of samples. The application of a Raman instrument infrastructure researched in the project represents a significant contribution to the further development and profiling of the InfectoGnostics research campus in the field of photonic diagnostic technologies by enabling measurements directly from blood cultures. The integration of the university hospital allows the direct performance of the reference analysis according to the current gold standard as well as the verification of the method under clinical conditions.
IPHT: In the joint project InfectoXplore, the Leibniz-IPHT will be responsible for sample preparation and Raman spectroscopic characterization of selected pathogens and their antibiotic interactions.
for the identification of resistances from early, positive blood cultures and transfer them to the Raman platform to be researched in the joint project.

The project is funded by the BMBF under the number 13GW0459A and co-financed by the project sponsor VDI – TZ Phys. Technol.

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