Our latest manuscript: "Synergistic combinations and repurposed antibiotics active against the pandrug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae Nevada strain." Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy early release identifies:
Highly synergistic activity of several antimicrobial combinations. Low apramycin and spectinomycin MIC values. CDC previously reported that none of 26 antimicrobials they tested were active against the Nevada strain. That made the strain until now pandrug-resistant. Links to several news articles about this pandrug-resistant strain:: The Atlantic. NPR, NBC, PBS. Forbes
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BIDMC press release on poster presented by postdoctoral fellow, Thea-Brennan Krohn, at the ASM Microbe Meeting in San Francisco this past weekend!
https://www.bidmc.org/about-bidmc/news/2019/06/combination-of-drugs-may-combat-deadly-drugresistant-fungus "Using the inkjet technology to dispense uniform samples of C. auris into each of the 96 wells in a standard lab testing plate, Brennan-Krohn tested 10 combinations against 10 strains of C. auris, a painstaking process that would have taken at least 50 hours if done by hand. It took less than two hours in total using the inkjet dispenser for Brennan-Krohn to find three novel combinations of antifungal and antibacterial drugs that demonstrated activity against this insidious new pathogen."
Adopted by the CDC .in their Antimicrobial Resistance Laboratory Network based on our prior publications in Journal of Clinical Microbiology, Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, and Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy for testing of aztreonam/ceftazidime-avibactam combination activity using inkjet printing. We provide a step by step video demonstration of assay setup in the Journal of Visualized Experimentation. Link to article landing page (PDF protocol access and video), "Antimicrobial Synergy Testing by the Inkjet Printer-assisted Automated Checkerboard Array and the Manual Time-kill Method" by Thea Brennan-Krohn and James E. Kirby.
ASM has reorganized their website. Their blogs are now impossible to find, They are now organized under author pages. Blogs from current and former research and/or clinical fellows:
KP Smith's blogs can be found at: www.asm.org/Biographies/Kenneth-(K-P-)-Smith Rose Lee's blogs can be found at: www.asm.org/Biographies/Rose-Lee Thea Brennan-Krohn's blogs can be found at: www.asm.org/Biographies/Thea-Brennan-Krohn Jennifer Tsang's blogs can be found at: www.asm.org/Biographies/Jennifer-Tsang New antibiotics that may offer additional and much needed treatment options will only be used in hospital systems if the clinical microbiology laboratory can provide timely antimicrobial susceptibility testing data. Historically there has been a time lag in the availability of susceptibility testing methods either at reference laboratories (long delay to results), incorporation in automated commercial systems (4 years), or simpler methods like disk diffusion and gradient strips that can be performed manually on an as needed basis. I was excited to learn that delafloxacin and meropenem/vaborbactam disk diffusion and gradient strip methods finally became available. Fantastic. However, before we can introduce those methods in the clinical laboratory, we need to validate performance of these methods per CLIA '88 regulations and good laboratory practice. This requires either comparing the new methods to a reference standard (broth microdilution -- need antibiotic powder, and a lot of set up time) or a set of strains that has been previously characterized by a reference dilution method and has a good representation of susceptible and resistant isolates. Those are serious roadblocks. By chance, I happened to give a talk at the Northeast Branch of the American Society of Microbiology and a someone from Melinta Pharmaceuticals happened to be there, and that someone referred me to our local Key Account Manager who offerred a solution "on request". Specifically, Melinta or other pharmaceutical companies are not allowed to approach me and tell me about a solution, but if I inquire independently and ask for a previously characterized set of bacterial isolates, they are allowed to tell me that in fact they have a series of previously characterized isolates for both drugs available for validation. These isolates are provided free of charge from Laboratory Specialist, Inc, Sent by FEDEX with first class documentation, data for broth microdilution performed circa ten times on each isolates with modal MICs and MIC distribution - wow, that is awesome. Methods validated beautifully. It just seems odd to me that such a valuable resource, providing clinical laboratories the ability to robustly evaluate AST methods for newly marketed drugs, needs to remain on a need to know basis. Clinical labs, please take note of this available resource. The same proved to be true for plazomicin. Achaogen uses the same Laboratory Specialists, Inc. to provide 30 characterized isolates on request; however, the FEDEX chargers are not absorbed. The FDA-CDC Biobank also now has a set of isolates characterized for plazomicin susceptibility and I see now also delafloxacin., I suspect the exact same set of organisms. The existing rule restricting such company-clinical laboratory communication about these important resources should be relaxed! We need facile access to validation strains sets to bring new testing into our laboratories in a timely fashion, to facilitate the availability of new antibiotics when they are most needed, and to help support profitability of antibiotic development by pharmaceutical companies.
Postdoctoral fellow, Thea Brennan-Krohn, recently had a manuscript accepted in the Journal of Visualized Experimentation, aka JoVE. The title of the manuscript and link to the abstract are "Antimicrobial Synergy Testing by the Inkjet Printer-Assisted Automated Checkerboard Array and the Manual Time-Kill Method." We have been fielding a lot of questions over the past two years about implementation of inkjet printing antimicrobial susceptibility testing technology and thought it would be useful to share a video of the technique as well as classic time-kill analysis to analyze antimicrobial synergy. We are excited to learn that the CDC has decided to implement the technology in the near future in their Antimicrobial Resistance Laboratory Network (ARLN), initially to test, the combination of ceftazidime-avibactam and aztreonam for activity against multidrug-resistant Gram-negatives.
"Research May Help Rescue Antibiotics’ Effectiveness in the Face of Drug-Resistant Bacteria"8/10/2018 BIDMC news release on Thea's antimicrobial synergy paper:
"Bacteria—especially Gram-negative strains—are becoming increasingly resistant to current antibiotic drugs, and the development of new classes of antibiotics has slowed. Faced with these challenges, investigators are studying the potential of combination therapy, in which two or more drugs are used together to increase or restore the efficacy of both drugs against a resistant bacterial pathogen. Now new research indicates that such synergy may work even when bacteria become resistant to colistin, which is considered a treatment agent of last resort. The findings are especially promising because recent evidence indicates the potential for rapid worldwide spread of colistin resistance. “For an infected patient, if the multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacterial pathogen is resistant to colistin, then there is a big problem,” said senior author James Kirby, MD, Director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory at BIDMC. In their Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy study, Kirby and his colleagues Thea Brennan-Krohn, MD and Alejandro Pironti, PhD screened 19 different antibiotics for synergy with colistin. The team discovered several combinations where synergy was present and infections with resistant pathogens could potentially be treated with the combination therapy. Of particular interest, colistin demonstrated high rates of synergy with linezolid, fusidic acid, and clindamycin, which are protein synthesis inhibitor antibiotics that individually have no activity against Gram-negative bacteria. “It was remarkable to see two drugs, each of which is inactive on its own against these bacteria, inhibiting them in combination,” notes Brennan-Krohn. “These findings suggest that colistin retains sub-lethal activity against colistin-resistant bacteria, which may enable drugs like linezolid to reach their targets.” “Faced with highly resistant pathogens, clinicians often currently treat with multiple antibiotics without knowing the benefit the combinations may provide,” said Kirby. “This study now provides some scientific underpinning for these choices and direction for future investigation.” He added that combination therapy may also allow clinicians to use lower effective doses of colistin and other drugs, which would help avoid toxicities associated with the medications as well as slow the development of antibiotic resistance. This work was funded in part with Federal funds from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Health and Human Services." Thanks to American Society of Microbiology science writer, Julie Wolf, for highlighting our inoculum effect manuscript in the ASM mBiosphere Blog, "A Little Change Can Make a Lot of MIC Difference: the Inoculum Effect and Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing"
Now live on the Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy Webpage: The Inoculum Effect in the Era of Multidrug Resistance: Minor Differences in Inoculum Have Dramatic Effect on MIC Determination.
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