Noscendo Partners with University Hospital Bonn To Characterize Antibiotic-Resistant Pathogens

Noscendo and the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) have announced the successful signing of a cooperative agreement with the Institute for Hygiene and Public Health (IHPH) at the UKB, working towards expansion of the proprietary and CE-certified diagnostic platform DISQVER® in the field of microbial resistances. Through the partnership, Noscendo aims to fully molecularly characterize up to 8000 antibiotic-resistant pathogens from over 35 species using the latest sequencing technology. The institute’s strain bank, which has been running for 20 years and is continually growing, and the environmental databank are fed from various national and international projects and their structure addresses significant resistance problems of today’s inpatient treatments.

“The ability to identify the infectious agent primarily responsible for an infection directly from patient material gives doctors an advantage when it comes to treatment. This applies above all to bacteria which are resistant to multiple antibiotics, the amount of which has risen sharply in recent years, not only in healthcare facilities but also in the environment,” says Dr. Ricarda Schmithausen, head of the One Health Working Group at the UKB. The researcher and her team are investigating the consequences of the spread of antibiotic-resistant germs through, among other things, wastewater or liquid manure. “If we can identify the pathogen and its resistances quickly, we can initiate targeted hygiene measures and antibiotic treatments.”

Following the successful development and CE certification of the DISQVER® platform, a pilot study in eight maximum-care hospitals in Germany confirmed the value of the Noscendo platform with regards to identification of the primary pathogen beyond several pathogen classes. The University Hospital Bonn is one of these hospitals and is doing the groundwork for Noscendo regarding the expansion to include direct differentiation of pathogens’ antibiotic resistances.

The cooperation between the Institute for Hygiene and Public Health at the UKB and companies with bioinformatics skills such as Noscendo GmbH can help to master the development and spread of resistance in a cooperative and synergetic manner,” adds Dr. Schmithausen. "Therefore, we are happy to be involved in the further development of an innovative software for future microbiological-hygienic infection diagnostics".

Since the beginning of the partnership with Noscendo, several clinically relevant resistant microorganisms have been analyzed down to the smallest detail and characterized using the DISQVER® diagnostic platform. As a consequence, it was already possible to attribute various outbreak events and incidents to specific bacterial culprits. It was also possible to meticulously retrace previously unexplained cases, where the hitherto unidentified bacterial strains involved had been stored in the IHPH’s strain bank.