Rapid ultra-high enrichment of bacterial pathogens at low concentration from whole blood for species ID and AMR prediction using Oxford Nanopore sequencing
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There is an urgent need for rapid and accurate diagnostics to guide targeted therapy for blood stream infections (BSIs). BSIs are among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality, yet the status quo culture-based diagnostics have a multi-day turnaround time (TAT) and limited ability to guide antibiotic therapy. Day Zero Diagnostics has developed Blood2Bac™, a species-agnostic culture-free method to enrich bacterial DNA directly from whole blood samples by a factor of 100,000,000. When Blood2Bac is coupled with ONT rapid whole genome sequencing and Day Zero Diagnostics’ algorithmic tools, we can determine bacterial species identification (ID) and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) within 10 hours of blood draw, a drastic decrease in diagnostic TAT. Here we demonstrate the performance of our technology on both contrived (spike-in) samples and clinical samples.