The first European patent for the technology for rapid determination of antibiotic resistance for Bacteromic
The patent protection of the technology applied in the BacterOMIC project will cover the method of ultra-rapid determination of antimicrobial drug resistance. - The Bacteromic system employs a number of algorithmic methods developed by our team. One of them allows for rapid detection of bacterial growth and – thanks to that – fast determination of the level of antibiotic-resistance – for some antibiotics and bacteria even within an hour, while standard determination lasts from a few to more than ten hours. We are pleased that we have been granted the patent by the European Patent Office. Protection of algorithmic methods is difficult, so we are satisfied not only with the high level of innovativeness, but also with the effective operation of our intellectual property protection team. This is the first patent for Bacteromic. We are now seeking to protect several solutions, also those related to microfluidic technologies. We systematically expand our portfolio of intellectual property rights for the developed technologies, creating the value of future commercialization of the system – explains Prof. Piotr Garstecki, co-founder, key shareholder and CEO of Scope Fluidics. The BacterOMIC project is being implemented according to an accelerated schedule, on the basis of which the Company plans to commercialize the system in Q3 2021. In April, Bacteromic completed the fifth stage of research and development works on BacterOMIC as scheduled, thus becoming ready to conduct internal prevalidation tests of the system and then pre-registration tests in clinical centres. The first stage of tests is currently conducted at the Company’s headquarters and is aimed at adapting analytical methods to the new version of the system. The tests will be conducted using reference strains recommended by EUCAST and clinical strains collected in the Company’s microbiological bank. After this stage, the clinical value of the system will be assessed in the target environment, i.e. in a diagnostic or research laboratory that routinely performs drug susceptibility testing of microorganisms. The BacterOMIC project is intended to respond to the growing phenomenon of antibiotic resistance, which is today recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the world’s greatest threats to public health – estimates indicate that drug-resistant bacteria could lead to the death of up to 300 million people worldwide in the next 35 years. Already today, 70% of infections in Europe are resistant to at least one antibiotic. Thanks to the technologies developed by the Warsaw team, the BacterOMIC system enables to determine the effectiveness of all antibiotics in a single test. It also allows to identify the effective combinations of antibiotic pairs. Bacteromic provides even 10 times more information from a single assay than competitive systems. The fact that BacterOMIC’s tests are significantly more comprehensive than in the case of other systems available on the market is its main competitive advantage.