Descrizione del progetto
Affinare le armi contro gli ostacoli antimicrobici
La lotta contro la crisi della resistenza agli antimicrobici, che rappresenta una grave causa di mortalità nell’Unione europea, richiede tecniche più rapide, flessibili ed efficienti. Il progetto GRAPHFITI, finanziato dall’UE, presenterà un approccio inedito alle tecnologie di verifica della suscettibilità antimicrobica avvalendosi del grafene per fronteggiare la minaccia dei patogeni resistenti ai farmaci. Come proseguimento del progetto di ricerca ENIGMA, finanziato dall’UE, GRAPHFITI convaliderà l’impiego delle membrane in grafene per sondare il movimento nanomeccanico delle cellule batteriche. Inoltre, il progetto permetterà l’utilizzo di membrane atomicamente sottili dotate di sensibilità alle cellule batteriche singole, facendo largo a una rivoluzione negli strumenti diagnostici per lo screening decentrato veloce della resistenza agli antimicrobici.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
- 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
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-POC - Proof of Concept GrantIstituzione ospitante
2628 CN Delft
Paesi Bassi