Multi-Drug Resistant Organisms (MDROs) are becoming a bigger and bigger concern throughout the world. Antibiotic resistance forms and spreads faster than pharmaceutical companies have been able to develop new antibiotic compounds. This stagnation in the development of new tools for the clinical laboratory to identify these organisms has equally been a problem. The traditional methods we use to identify and determine antibiotic resistance and susceptibility have not significantly changed for at least 50 years. Although these techniques are effective, they continue to require highly skilled staff, and multiple days to get a definitive result. Novel technologies, like Smarticles, are in development today with the goal to help identify drug resistant organisms the same day that samples are collected with automated systems. Technologies like Smarticles provide the promise of significantly improving our ability to identify carriers of these organisms and prevent them from spreading to other patients in the hospital.
Dr. Cagas will give an overview of the growing threat that MDROs pose, how Clinical Microbiology has evolved to where it is today, and how novel technologies, like Smarticles, have the potential to cause a significant paradigm shift for clinical laboratories and the hospitals they serve.