A three-level model for therapeutic drug monitoring of antimicrobials at the site of infection
Addressing bacterial resistance – an international and multidisciplinary group of researchers including MedLab Fellow Noé Brasier, MD, and Prof. Jörg Goldhahn, MD, at the Institute of Translational Medicine at ETH Zurich, describes a novel model to determine the antimicrobial concentrations at the site of infection by implementing wearable biofluid analysis.
Bacterial resistance to antimicrobial agents is a common cause of death worldwide, prolongs hospital stays and increases healthcare costs. Driving causes of the silent pandemic of bacterial resistance are excessive use of antimicrobials as well as a lack of incentives to develop new pharmacological compounds.
A recently published work in the world leading Journal for Infectious Diseases proposes a novel three-level model to describe the antibiotic concentrations at the site of infection using wearable biofluid analysis. Antibiotics such as β-lactams and glycopeptides are well detectable in non-invasively collectable biofluids such as sweat and exhaled breath. The proposed model relies on linking blood-based drug measurement (upstream of the site of infection) with the drug concentrations in non-invasive biofluids stemming from the site of infection (downstream of the site of infection). This additional information may hold significant potential to better understand how antibiotic drugs penetrate through the tissue, interpret the drug concentrations at site of infection, and may even improve therapeutic drug monitoring. Further, this novel model holds great promises to substitute conventional analytical procedures in direction of a lab-independent, continuous, and straight-forward therapeutic drug monitoring.
In the further development of the technique, the priority is now to conduct a concrete needs assessment of all stakeholders, to implement the full technological development and to conduct clinical trials to better understand the physiology and demonstrate the added value for clinical application.
A seminar on next-generation digital biomarkers is going to be conducted on October 5th at ETH Zurich that extends the discussion about wearable biofluid analysis and the translational challenges. Further information will be available soon.
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