Description du projet
Optimiser nos armes contre l’obstruction antimicrobienne
La résistance aux antimicrobiens est une cause grave de mortalité dans l’Union européenne et des techniques plus rapides, plus flexibles et plus efficaces sont nécessaires pour la contrer. Le projet GRAPHFITI, financé par l’UE, introduira une approche innovante aux technologies de test de sensibilité aux antimicrobiens en utilisant le graphène pour traiter la menace des agents pathogènes résistants aux médicaments. Dans le prolongement du projet de recherche ENIGMA financé par l’UE, GRAPHFITI validera l’utilisation de membranes en graphène pour sonder le mouvement nanomécanique des cellules bactériennes. Le projet permettra en outre d’utiliser des membranes atomiquement minces avec une sensibilité de cellule bactérienne unique, révolutionnant la boîte à outils de diagnostic pour le dépistage rapide de la résistance aux antimicrobiens sur le lieu d’intervention.
Objectif
Today, antimicrobial resistance is emerging as a global burden, endangering our lives. Drug-resistant pathogens kill about 25,000 infected people solely in the European Union every year. In the fight against this crisis, rapid Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (AST) plays a crucial role. Although effective in discerning the right concentration of antibiotics required to inhibit the growth of a pathogen, conventional AST techniques are not fit for point-of-care, since they are slow and require large microbial inocula.
The advent of graphene, and the ability to fabricate one-atom thick membranes, has made it possible to make miniaturised sensors that are extremely sensitive to nanoscale forces. During the research project ENIGMA carried out in the framework of the ERC Starting Grant no. 802093, we have developed a methodology that can probe nanomechanical motion of graphene membranes in the presence of bacterial cells. Here, I propose to further validate this technology and realize a proof-of-concept demonstrator that offers automated high throughput AST using massively parallelized graphene membranes. By eliminating the need for culturing large number of bacterial cells, GRAPHFITI has the potential to shift the current paradigm of AST technologies towards the use of atomically thin membranes with single bacterial cell sensitivity, thus enabling diagnostic tools for fast point-of-care screening of antimicrobial resistance.
Champ scientifique
- engineering and technologynanotechnologynano-materialstwo-dimensional nanostructuresgraphene
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologybacteriology
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepharmacology and pharmacypharmaceutical drugsantibiotics
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensors
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepharmacology and pharmacydrug resistanceantibiotic resistance
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-POC - Proof of Concept GrantInstitution d’accueil
2628 CN Delft
Pays-Bas