While electronic sniffers have been in use for quite some time now to detect bacteria in cultures, cost as well as the size of such devices has largely prohibited their proliferation throughout the healthcare system where staph infections have become an increasingly prominent concern for patients and healthcare workers alike. MRSA, or methicillin-resistant SA, in particular has become a cause for serious concern, due to its having rapidly evolved extremely strong and often unassailable resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics like penicillins and cephalosporins, subsequently leading to tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of difficult to treat infections each year.
With around an estimated 10k deaths in the U.S. alone each year linked to MRSA/SA infections, the looming specter of rapidly evolving MRSA and other bugs, a direct response to overuse and often misuse of antibiotics, has caused many in the medical community to hypothesize that we may be witnessing the potential end of antibiotics as we know it. Compounding the problem is the fact that the highest prevalence of cases is among patients with open wounds or invasive devices, especially if such patients already have weakened immune systems. This means that there is an entire class of high-risk patients for whom early detection is vital if there is any hope at all of saving the patient when they do get a serious infection, even with aggressive treatments like quinazoline, a newly developed (now in preclinical testing) class of chemical compounds which may be able to effectively treat MRSA. It will take considerable time to develop and get promising treatments like quinazoline out to the front lines and for now doctors have been turning more and more to highly toxic and severe alternatives like colistin, which despite unavoidable kidney damage, is sometimes the only way to save the patient.
Such harsh alternatives are increasingly dangerous the further along a given patient’s infection is and precise, early detection/treatment is also fundamental to slowing down the evolution of various resistant bacteria in the aggregate, as not allowing a colony of bacteria to flourish and then jump to a new host is essential to slowing its evolution. The CDC estimates that on the whole, some 2 million people are infected every year with some type of antibiotic-resistant infection, resulting in over 23k fatalities. Naturally, the demand for ways to detect such infections early on, so that they may be delimited and combated effectively, is increasingly becoming the major focus.
Zenosense is at the forefront of the effort to curb the spread and evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, having pioneered the development of Sgenia group division, Zenon Biosystem’s algal (water) sensor platform under contract. Designed as a cost-effective solution that can be deployed as both a wearable/bedside device and fixed device to monitor a room, the company’s MRSA/SA detector based on the Sgenia technology developed by Zenon, pairs a single off the shelf commercial sensor with a proprietary Sgenia chip and powerful mathematical processing software, effectively yielding a multiplicity of virtual sensors that can continuously scan for precise volatile organic compound (VOC) markers produced by a MRSA/SA infection. The company is also developing this same revolutionary sensor platform for lung cancer detection and has already manufactured a pre-commercial lung cancer detection device, having subsequently launched a 400-person trial. It is not unthinkable that this sensor platform could one day be developed for yet more detection roles, as the core VOC sniffing technology lends itself quite readily to additional potential applications.
The MRSA/SA detection prototype being developed by ZENO has already achieved one of the company’s main development goals by having successfully hit 95%-plus sensibility detection rates in a series of tests conducted in a clinical setting. Moreover, the device has proven to consume very little power, lasting for an entire normal work shift on a single battery charge, making it ideal for per-patient use in a healthcare setting. A mains powered unit for doing room-based continuous detection should be equally cheap and cost-effective, providing the perfect answer to monitoring patients who are known to be at risk, especially in typical high-risk areas like nursing homes or wherever extended care of high-risk patients is normal.
The VOC signature spectrum analysis of this detection platform is quite precise as well and the ability to accurately discriminate from background VOCs in a roughly 10 foot bubble around a potentially infected patient means the device works like a continuous MRSA/SA smoke detector, producing an audio and visual warning whenever a successful detection of active infection is made. Such a device, which would detect infection and alert healthcare workers before the patient even begins to show signs of infection, would be a real game changer. Moreover, there is potential with the highly-sensitive Sgenia technology to eventually discriminate MRSA from SA as well, saving even more time, money, and no doubt, lives.
Zenosense has a clear first-mover advantage co-developing and marketing cost-effective detection devices for MRSA/SA and lung cancer. There is abundant need for the technology and demand shows no signs of diminishing for the foreseeable future.
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