Personalising therapies for infection

Status: Ongoing

Infections are common, with 40% of presentations to hospital (approximately 44M every year) caused by or complicated by infections. Infection has significant short and long-term impacts especially in older patients. Hospitalised infection survivors have increased care needs as well as high rates of re-admissions for recurrent infections.

There is strong evidence that early, appropriate treatment with anti-microbial therapies (such as antibiotics for bacteria and anti-virals for viral infections) reduce the mortality, complications and recovery time from infections. However, it is still challenging to identify if a patient has an infection or not, and what type of organism may be causing it. In over half of the cases of hospitalised infections, the causal bacteria, virus or fungus is not identified.

Current treatment is usually powerful broad-spectrum antibiotics via a drip, but these can have side effects, especially in older adults. Also, antibiotic resistance is increasing, meaning the antibiotics we have work less well and do not work at all in some people. Even when on the right antibiotic, the patient’s immune system is still needed to fight infection, but in many cases, especially in older adults, the immune system can be impaired, worsening the response to infection. Ideally, we would know exactly what pathogen was causing and infection, and any resistance patterns, so the right antibiotic could be given straight away. Ideally, we would also give treatments to improve how the immune system works during an infection.

Project aims

This study aims to improve outcomes from infections and the associated, damaging inflammation which infections cause, through two approaches:

• state-of-the-art real-time pathogen diagnostics, enabling bacteria and viruses to be identified quickly, and appropriate antimicrobial therapy to be given
• to better understand how infections effect the host immune system, to see if the body’s own immune cells can be targeted to improve their ability to locate invading microbes and kill them