The real-world study compared data and patient outcomes before and after implementation of the AtbFinder for the most hard-to-treat lung infection caused by multidrug-resistant pathogens in subjects with cystic fibrosis. As data showed, AtbFinder had successfully guided physicians to select the most effective antibiotic therapy that eradicated highly antibiotic resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria, which led to decreased hospitalizations along with a two-fold reduction in systemic antibiotic therapy and enhanced overall patient outcomes.
AtbFinder is fundamentally different from other antimicrobial susceptibility tests as it, for the first time, selects antibiotics that target the entire bacterial community. The test offers a unique combination of culture-free phenotypic testing with unprecedented specificity and accuracy of antibiotic selection directly from the patient clinical sample. AtbFinder is an all-in-one prefabricated kit that screens 188 antibiotics and their combinations per patient sample and delivers results within just four hours, compared to up to 72 hours for conventional phenotypic tests.
“While there are certain innovations in diagnostics for patients with sepsis, for patients with respiratory, skin-and soft tissue and urinary tract infections, the technology used now was developed in late 1980s. Since then, the rate of ineffective antibiotic selection has been increasing, and is approaching 40% for some diseases, which is believed to contribute to higher mortality rates,” said George Tetz, a scientific founder of the project. “AtbFinder is a new era in antimicrobial susceptibility testing that can potentially save thousands of lives and reduce healthcare costs. We are working to make AtbFinder available to physicians and patients, already this year.”
As data showed, physicians using AtbFinder were able, for the first time, to select therapeutic regimens that eradicated Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which is increasingly resistant to antibiotics and persisted in patients for years, despite hundreds of attempted antibiotic courses. In addition, lung functioning exhibited over 27% improvement with AtbFinder® identified therapy compared to conventional intervention.
Furthermore, once patients switched to antibiotic therapy selected with the AtbFinder, they no longer required hospitalization due to pulmonary exacerbations, as compared to several annual hospitalizations needed when the antibiotic selection was guided by conventional tests.
AtbFinder® is based on a recent discovery of a Novel Biology in which cells interact with each other using a previously unknown receptor system discovered by professors Victor and George Tetz from the Human Microbiology Institute in New York City.
“We are very excited that AtbFinder based on novel principles for antibiotic selection demonstrated such groundbreaking results,” said Victor Tetz, a scientific founder of the project. “Other tests ignore complex interbacterial interactions at the site of infection, which are the most critical in terms of antibiotic response prediction. In its selection of antibiotics, AtbFinder for the first time considers the interaction of not only the leading bacterial pathogens with antibiotics, but analyzes how the whole microbial community responds to the antibiotic assault. It’s like switching to a 3D image from 1 dimension.”
Scientists at TGV-Dx believe that these findings highlight the advantage of “targeting the entire microbial community ” to antibiotics utilized by AtbFinder for patients with severe and recurrent infections.
About TGV-Dx, Inc.
TGV-Dx, Inc. is an in vitro diagnostics company revolutionizing the way doctors select antibiotics. The AtbFinder® diagnostic test is an all-in-one prefabricated kit that is based on a new principle of antibiotic selection for patients with different bacterial infections. It delivers results within 4 hours, which is days faster than any conventional tests. The AtbFinder tests the largest menu of up to 188 antibiotics and combinations thereof, which is up to 15x more than conventional tests.
