Rapid diagnostics and strain typing in the era of increasing AMR

Join this free webinar organised by ISAC's Rapid Diagnostics & Biomarkers Working Group

11 April at 13.00 (UK) / 14.00 (CET)

The aim is to learn from current experiences across the globe on how rapid diagnosis impacts on curbing antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

Lectures

• Novel diagnostics for UTIs and impact on rapid antimicrobial sensitivity - Dr Lucy Bock
• Rapid diagnosis of Hepatitis B in a LMIC and impact on prevention measures - Dr Saranga Sumathipala
• Metagenomics and potential impact on AMR and infection prevention in critical care settings

Speakers

Dr Lucy Bock is a Senior Project Team Leader in the Antimicrobial Discovery, Development and Diagnostics Group at UK Health Security Agency, Porton. Her interest lies in converting scientific knowledge about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) into real-life solutions to solve the hidden pandemic of AMR. For the last 3 years she has been developing an impedance-based fast antimicrobial susceptibility test (iFAST) in collaboration with the engineering department at the University of Southampton resulting in commercialisation of the technology (iFAST Diagnostics Inc.). Lucy was awarded her Ph.D. in Molecular Medicine from the European Institute of Oncology in Milan, Italy.

Dr Saranga Sumathipala is Clinical Virologist & Head of Department of Clinical Virology & Core Facility Head/NGS Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute (Apeksha Hospital), Sri Lanka

He studied medicine at the University of Peradeniya and received his postgraduate diploma in Medical Microbiology from the University of Colombo. He is Board certified as Specialist in Medical Virology (Sri Lanka).

His areas of expertise include laboratory diagnostics in medical microbiology / medical virology / molecular diagnostics. He has extensive clinical expertise in management of infectious diseases with an emphasis on virology).

Prof. Jonathan Edgeworth is a clinical microbiologist at Guy’s & St Thomas Hospital with a sub-speciality interest in prevention, diagnosis and management of intensive care unit infections. His long-standing research interest has been in antimicrobial resistance, but over the past 5 years his group have increasingly focussed on evaluating the potential for nanopore sequencing to transition from a research tool into clinical service.

This increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic when the laboratory began evaluating respiratory metagenomics, assessing how it could address some of the recognised limitations of traditional microbiological techniques and thereby improve antimicrobial stewardship, outbreak detection and public health surveillance. To take this forward, Jonathan joined Oxford Nanopore Technologies on a part-time basis in October 2022. He now splits his time between leading the translational research programme at St Thomas’ Hospital and being based in Oxford providing clinical insights into requirements for implementing rapid pathogen sequencing into a routine laboratory setting.

 

Dr Kordo Saeed is Chair of the ISAC Rapid Diagnostics & Biomarkers Working Group. He is currently working as a consultant clinical microbiologist and lead for the bacteriology laboratory at University Hospitals Southampton NHS Foundation Trust & an honorary associate professor at the University of Southampton School of Medicine. His interests are infections in intensive care and orthospinal & major trauma-related infections. He is the chair of the Rapid Diagnostics and Biomarker Working Group of the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (ISAC) and the secretary for the Bone and Joint Infection Working Group. He has published on Infection Control, Antibiotic Stewardship, Bone and Joint Infections and sepsis.

Prof. Heiman Wertheimis a professor in clinical microbiology and heads the clinical microbiology department at Radboud University Medical Center and is chair of the Radboud Center of Infectious Diseases (RCI, www.radboudrci.nl). RCI unites all efforts at Radboudumc to tackle infectious diseases, from fundamental work to clinical trials to population based studies. Heiman operates in an international network spanning Asia and Africa where he conducts his research. Until 2015, Heiman was director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU, www.oucru.org) in Hanoi, Vietnam. He works with a multidisciplinary approach to have an impact on global healthcare, particularly in the area of antimicrobial resistance spanning: health systems, policy development, behaviour, surveillance, prevention, genomics, and clinical trials. He is on the advisory board of RIVM/Cib (national Center for Infectious Disease Control) . Heiman is chair for the Netherlands Society Medical Microbiology and treasurer of ISAC.