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- $1.3 billion estimated global market for clinical microbiology

- Rapid detection of MRSA

Overview

Acolyte Biomedica Ltd provides rapid diagnostic systems for clinical microbiology. Acolyte's BacLite® platform allows microbial detection in hours instead of days, improving laboratory workflow, reducing hospital costs and improving management of microbial infections. The BacLite® system is unique within infectious disease diagnostics, providing accelerated culture-based detection of micro-organisms direct from clinical specimens.

Background

In the UK, the spread of MRSA has generated many headlines and created much controversy. It is, however, just one manifestation of a much broader global issue. Increasing resistance to antibiotics means that infectious diseases have re-emerged as a serious health issue across the world. In the UK alone, for example, hospital-acquired infections cause an estimated 5,000 patient deaths per annum.

The problem of diagnosis is exacerbated greatly by the traditional manually-intensive bacteriological process of culturing organisms. As a result, a long (two to four days) lead time is required for diagnosis. Worse: 45-90% of current provisionally-assessed broad spectrum antibiotic treatments are inappropriate.

Founded by ANGLE in 2000, Acolyte Biomedica addresses this critical issue. Its platform technology, BacLite®, slashes the lead time to diagnose and deliver successful antibiotic therapy from days to just five hours. It also delivers two other key benefits. First, its widespread application should reduce the spread of resistant organisms and, consequently, extend the life of available antibiotics. Second, it helps healthcare providers reduce costs by minimising hospital stays, cutting levels of secondary testing and facilitating continued use of less expensive antibiotics.

BacLite® is based on IP originally developed by the UK’s Porton Down based Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (Dstl). It benefits from 13 years’ investment by the UK’s Ministry of Defence in AK Rapid® diagnostics technology. This exploits the bioluminescent detection of Adenylate Kinase (AK) for ultrasensitive micro-organism detection. AK itself is a highly sensitive marker enzyme used to detect low levels of cell numbers such as biological warfare agents.

Market Opportunity

The market ‘canvas’ for Acolyte’s proprietary diagnostic systems and research reagents in clinical microbiology is estimated today at $1.3 billion. In human terms this means, for example an estimated 140,000 UK MRSA infections and a staggering 5 million MRSA tests (15 million in the US) per annum. As rapid testing is adopted for active surveillance, these levels will almost certainly rise sharply. More broadly, BacLite® is ideally positioned to address many established and emerging needs across the whole domain of life sciences.

Progress

During the year Acolyte launched the BacLite® flex hospital patient/staff MRSA screening system, resulting in the successful early adoption of the BacLite® flex screening system for routine patient screening in a number of private and NHS hospitals in the UK. In addition Acolyte has also won an extension of the exclusive worldwide licence for Acolyte’s core technology (AK Rapid®) into the fields of life science research, veterinary diagnostics and clinical and veterinary hygiene monitoring, as well as launching the BacLite® RapiTECT™ range of life sciences research tools.

Website: www.acolytebiomedica.com

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