Next generation clinical diagnostics of bacterial infections

Research Project, 2025

The number of infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria is growing rapidly, threatening modern healthcare.Hospitals are in urgent need of new, rapid, and cost-efficient diagnostic methods to meet this threat and to ensure thatbacterial infections still can be treated with effective antibiotics. In this project, we will use Optical DNA Mapping(ODM) – an emerging nanotechnology-based technique that analyzes single bacterial DNA molecules – toestablish a completely new method for diagnosing bacterial infections and antibiotic resistance. The method,schematically shown in Fig. 1, requires a minuscule amount of starting DNA which means that the time-consuming bacterial cultivation can be avoided. The main aim of the project is to thoroughly evaluate the methodfor two important clinical syndromes; lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI), and colonization of virulent andantibiotic-resistant pathogens in the gastrointestinal tract, keeping in mind that the methodology is general for anybacterial infection. The outcome of the project it to show that ODM-based diagnostics overcomes crucial hurdles intraditional infection diagnostics. The proposed research has the potential to significantly improve the diagnostics ofbacterial infections – and thereby enable more efficient antibiotic treatment at an earlier stage. The project is based at Chalmers University of Technology with close collaborations with groups at Karolinska Institutet, Uppsala University and Lund University with competence in clinical microbiology, microbial genomics, nanotechnology, image analysis,and data science/AI.