An automated, scalable, and rapid AST system for Gonorrhea STIs

Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted infection (STI) caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae (NG) that infects the urogenital, anorectal and pharyngeal tracts in humans. In 2018, there were an estimated 1.14M cases in the US, and 86.9M cases worldwide. Of concern is the growing incidence of antimicrobial resistance

not only due to inappropriate use of antibiotics, but also because NG interacts with and acquires genetic material from other co-infections in the anatomical sites that it infects. This wide range of resistance mechanisms that NG isolates can potentially harbor makes it very challenging to develop rapid molecular

methods of Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing (AST). Even among phenotypic AST methods, it has so far not been considered feasible to perform automated broth microdilution based ASTs on NG: principally because it is a fastidious organism in liquid culture. As a result, the primary method used to perform ASTs for NG is the

manual agar dilution method, which (because it is so labor intensive) is currently conducted in only a very limited number of public health labs. Even these labs test only 200-300 samples a month. Acenxion Biosystems proposes to develop the first fully automated NG phenotypic AST platform that both satisfies the current CDC guidance for surveillance and fulfils an unmet clinical need for AST-guided “directed”

antibiotic therapy. Our instrument will provide Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC) and Susceptible/ Intermediate /Resistance (S/I/R) interpretation in < 6 hours with minimal sample preparation (