Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotic Resistance - A Global Health Crisis

Antibiotic resistance is a global health crisis predicted to overtake cancer and heart disease as the leading cause of death by 2050, potentially taking 10 million lives annually (World Health Organization). In 2019, antibiotic-resistant infections directly caused 1.2 million deaths and significantly contributed to an additional 4.95 million deaths globally (1). In the US alone, there are over 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections annually, resulting in 35,000 deaths (2). Contributing to this crisis, it is estimated that half of antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary or misused (3). Hospitals are particularly affected, with over 1.4 million resistant hospital-acquired infections occurring annually in the US (4). The financial burden of treating antibiotic-resistant infections in the US healthcare system is significant, costing approximately $50,000 to $200,000 per patient and resulting in a cumulative $70 billion lost annually (5).

The Science Behind Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria mutate or acquire DNA enabling mechanisms to withstand the drugs designed to kill them. Resistance-prone infections mutate rapidly and therefore evolve quickly, leading to the high propensity of developing multidrug resistance (MDR) upon treatment, requiring a precision medicine approach for successful therapy (6). Currently, there is no diagnostic screen for these infections, leading to worsened patient outcomes and higher treatment costs.

Current Challenges

The current standard of care relies on bacterial culturing, which is slow (taking 4-7 days) and often results in empirical treatment (educated trial and error) rather than precision treatment. This can lead to the misuse of antibiotics, decreased treatment success rates, and increased resistance emergence.

The Promise of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS)

NGS is a newer approach for diagnosing bacterial infections and is significantly more precise, sensitive, and accurate than standard of care. In addition, NGS dramatically reduces time to diagnosis (<24 hours). However, NGS is not widely adopted due to the lack of data analytics capabilities enabling resistance prediction in hospitals.

Resources and Further Reading

For more detailed information, you can explore the following resources:

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