Project description
Optimising our weapons against antimicrobial obstruction
Fighting the crisis of antimicrobial resistance as a serious cause of mortality in the European Union requires quicker, more flexible and efficient techniques. The EU-funded GRAPHFITI project will introduce an innovative approach to antimicrobial susceptibility testing technologies using graphene to address the drug-resistant pathogens threat. As a continuation of the EU-funded ENIGMA research project, GRAPHFITI will validate the use of graphene membranes for probing nanomechanical motion of bacterial cells. Moreover, the project will enable utilising atomically thin membranes with single bacterial cell sensitivity, revolutionising the diagnostic toolkit for the rapid point-of-care screening of antimicrobial resistance.
Objective
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.
Fields of science
- 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)
Funding Scheme
ERC-POC - Proof of Concept GrantHost institution
2628 CN Delft
Netherlands