Accelerate Diagnostics to collaborate with CDC for detection of antibiotic-resistant bio-threat agents

Accelerate Diagnostics, Inc., an in vitro diagnostics company providing solutions for the global challenge of drug-resistant organisms, has entered into a research collaboration with the Rapid Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing Laboratory at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to develop tests for the rapid analysis of antibiotic-resistant bio-threat agents based on Accelerate's high-speed identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing platform.

Bacterial bio-threat agents and diseases such as anthrax, tularemia, and plague pose significant national security and public health risks. While infections with these pathogens are rare in the United States, they can be disseminated or transmitted from person to person and result in high mortality rates. They therefore require special public health preparedness and surveillance so that any potential bio-threat activity or disease outbreaks can be rapidly identified and contained.

Early detection, isolation, and treatment with effective antibiotics are critical to cure patients and limit the spread of disease. Conventional testing methods available in hospital and public health labs can take several days to produce results. These methods are therefore unable to provide critical, time-sensitive information to the healthcare community, denying caregivers the opportunity to manage infection and prevent outbreaks at the earliest stage. Accelerate Diagnostics is developing a fully integrated platform that provides high-speed identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing of pathogens, working directly from patient samples. The platform enables laboratories to provide results in hours.

Accelerate Diagnostics will use its expertise to develop assays for rapid identification of key bacterial bio-threat agents, their virulence markers, and their antibiotic susceptibility and resistance profiles. The CDC will provide scientific expertise on the microbiology and molecular biology of bio-threat agents, and will evaluate and optimize the performance of the platform, using its collection of bio-threat agents. The CDC has purchased the Accelerate ID/AST platform for use in its laboratory. Learn more about the Accelerate ID/AST platform.