MicroPhage’s Bacteria Tests Mean Smarter Antibiotic Use
Another use: detecting salmonella before food ships
LONGMONT – It now takes two days – or longer – for a laboratory to identify the bacteria that is making you sick. A Longmont company’s work holds the promise of making that identification in four to six hours, meaning your doctor can prescribe the right antibiotic far quicker, and you can start feeling better faster.
Early this year MicroPhage Inc. completed development of a rapid assay test for salmonella, a common cause of food poisoning and currently is talking with potential strategic partners to market the test.
The salmonella test is expected to be introduced into the . industrial market within a year to 18 months, where it will enable tests on food before entering the distribution chain, according to Scott Gaisford, the company’s chief executive officer. Today, contaminated food often is shipped before longer tests are completed, leading to recalls of entire shipments and warnings to consumers.
Chief Executive Scon Gaisford, left, and founder and President Jack Wheeler lead MicroPhage Inc. in Longmont. The company is developing test kits that reduce the amount of time it takes to identify illness-causing bacteria. The tests take a few hours and can be conducted in a doctor’s office.
MicroPhage’s current work focuses on developing rapid tests for staph aureus, strep pneumonia and E. coli, pathogens that are causes of respiratory, pneumonia and blood-borne diseases. Gaisford said the company hopes to know whether the new assays work properly within six to nine months.
Between these test kits and numerous others MicroPhage plans to develop in coming years that target additional microbes, the company projects about $50 million in annual revenue within five years. The salmonella test alone could generate hundreds of thousands of assay- kit sales annually at about $20 each, company officials have said.
The potential of those tests recently helped the company raise an additional $1.5 million in venture capital funds to add to $1.05 million raised earlier.
The additional funds enabled MicroPhage to double the size of its research and development staff, double its laboratory space and accelerate the number of pathogens it could investigate at one time, Gaisford said.
The company’s new rapid assays, which will come in the form of small, simple test kits that can be used in a physician’s office, also will determine simultaneously whether the targeted bacteria is susceptible to a particular antibiotic so doctors won’t need to prescribe broad-spectrum antibiotics as often.
“We hope to provide data quickly enough that the original antibiotic prescribed will be the right one,” he said.
Broad-spectrum antibiotics, prescribed when doctors aren’t certain just what bacteria is causing an illness, frequently lead to bacteria developing resistance to common drugs. Deaths from drug- resistant bacterial infections have been increasing in recent years.
But if the illness proves viral – in which case antibiotics won’t work anyway-a negative test will prevent useless prescribing of often-expensive drugs. The tests will “provide a significant amount of diagnostic capability that does not exist now,” said Jack Wheeler, president and chief marketing officer
“People are suffering as a result of lack of rapid testing,” Wheeler said, noting that 200,000 Americans die annually from various blood-borne infections. “More-rapid diagnostics will reduce mortality, although we don’t know by how much.”
Unlike the salmonella test that an outside company will market for MicroPhage, the company is considering selling the new tests itself to physicians. “We have to do a very careful plan. We don’t know ourselves now which way is better,” Gaisford said.
MicroPhage’s new technology is simple enough for quick usage. “For any diagnostics to be used in a physician’s office, it has to be extremely easy to use and extraordinarily reliable” to meet government standards, Gaisford said. “It has to be capable of being run by a completely untrained person.”
Physicians traditionally send a sample of the suspected bacteria to a laboratory. There, the sample is filtered to increase the pathogen’s concentration, then cultured for two to three days until the bacteria multiply enough for a clinical microbiologist to identify them.
In MicroPhage’s technique, suspect material is placed into a vial containing particular bacteriophages, which are nonliving particles that infect specific bacteria much like viruses infect human cells. The company already has identified more than 90 disease bacteria that are infected by distinctive bacteriophages.
After several hours, the bacteriophage replicates enough to explode bacterial cell membranes. A few drops are placed onto a test strip, where they flow across a plastic membrane to contact bacteriophage antibodies. If the target bacteria are present, the bacteriophage binds to the antibodies, forming a visible Une.
The assay also can put the bacteria in contact with samples of different antibiotics to determine which one kills it.
The now three-year old company grew out of work conducted at Colorado School of Mines in Golden that originally was aimed at detecting biological-warfare agents such as anthrax. Researchers realized that bacteriophages produce distinctive readings that identify their specific bacterial targets.
“We hope to provide data quickly enough that the original antibiotic prescribed will be the right one.”
Scott Gaisford
CHIEF EXECUTIVE, MICROPHAGE INC.
MicraPhage Inc.
2400 Trade Centre Ave.
Longmont CO 80503
(303)339-1410
www.micro-phage.com
“People are suffering as a result of lack of rapid testing. More rapid diagnostics will reduce mortality.”
Jack Wheeler
PRESIDENT, MICROPHAGE INC.
BY SALLY BELL
Business Report Correspondent
Copyright The Boulder County Business Report Aug 19-Sep 1, 2005