Automated Blood Culture Preparation Robot for Faster Sepsis Diagnosis
In this newly established public-private partnership, BugSee AB, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and Erasmus MC are collaborating to drastically accelerate sepsis diagnostics. The project automates the sample isolation workflow by coupling novel selective cell lysis chemistry with a microfluidic platform. This integration delivers clean, mass-spectrometry-ready bacterial pellets directly from positive blood cultures in less than fifteen minutes.
Sepsis is a rapidly progressing, life-threatening syndrome that affects approximately 3.4 million people annually in the European Union, leading to roughly 700,000 fatalities. Every single hour of delay in administering effective antimicrobial therapy reduces a patient's survival probability by about 9%. Because current identification methods require a tedious 48-to-72-hour workflow, often forced to wait for overnight agar plating to remove biological contaminants, clinicians must rely on broad-spectrum antibiotics.
This sub-optimal practice heavily drives antimicrobial resistance, making rapid diagnostic innovation a matter of absolute survival. To solve this critical bottleneck, the project bypasses the overnight culture step entirely. The approach uses BugSee’s patented selective-lysis chemistry to destroy human blood cells while leaving bacterial cells intact. KTH’s Division of Nanobiotechnology then integrates this chemistry into an automated, centrifugal "Lab-on-a-Disc" device. By optimising spin profiles and passive fluidic controls, the platform automatically enriches and pellets the bacteria, removing interfering biological substances.
By the end of the 18-month project, the consortium will deliver a validated manual reference workflow and an optimized selective-lysis buffer dataset. The primary technical output will be a functional, automated closed microfluidic prototype device. Finally, Erasmus MC will deliver a comprehensive clinical analytical validation report, proving the system’s compatibility, purity, and recovery rates within routine clinical microbiology settings.
