Little more than a year since its win at the Lab Awards, Cytecom has secured an NIHCR contract to take its bacterial detection application through the first stage of clinical development. Ian Bowkett speaks to co-founder Conor Edwards.
Given the current focus on antimicrobial resistance, it is perhaps small wonder that a device designed to more efficiently measure antimicrobial efficacy excited such interest. Coventry-based Cytecom secured Best Technology Innovation at the 2022 Lab Awards for its live bacterial counter, described as a next-generation product to replace the tried and tested plate count method.
“Cytecom has a vision to put an end to the troublesome, time-consuming and labourintensive plate counts – the microbiology gold standard for quantification of live bacterial cells,” stated the nomination.
The Warwick University spin-out’s aim was that its CyteCount device would obtain the same results “in a fraction of the time, with much less labour and no need for expensive laboratory infrastructure”.
The cited results appeared impressive. In place of a procedure involving dilutions preparation, incubation and manual counting taking days, sample applications were placed on a cartridge for automated cell counts, testing times reduced to 30 minutes, with a level of accuracy close to that gold standard.
In addition to speed, it boasted the benefits of easy, on-site operability with little specialist training, low cost and sustainability (agar pad usage time quadrupled to four weeks) – whether applied to medical evaluations, food and beverage manufacture or water diagnostics.
The challenge, as always, has been to ensure that success in the controlled laboratory research environment can be replicated at industrial scale. That has demanded a different approach, acknowledges co-founder Conor Edwards.
“We have shifted focus from delivering a product per se: this is a prototype of an application. Typically, the way we organise delivery of consumables etc, is people buy a certain amount for a given project and then, when you factor the labour costs that are saved, the pricing is quite good.
“Now the main benefit – because we’ve got scalable supply chains, European and UK-based – as we grow as a compan y, [is] the price will come down significantly as we bulk manufacture. So, there’s a lot of room for scalability and sustainability of our products.”
While the potential uses of the technology may be broad, the relatively untapped scientific field of bacterial electrophysiology has been prioritised by the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC) as an area of innovation. Cytecom’s primary target, says Edwards, is employing its expertise for rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing:
“We’ve recently been awarded a £1.5 million contract by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHCR) to take our device through the first stages of clinical development. This is the performer feasibility study into how well our technology can be used to r apidly detect antibiotic susceptibility.”
They will be partnered with three teams: a clinical lab team assessing the economics of implementation in the healthcare system; a public engagement team to ensure tangible life benefits to patients; and a statistics and data team to develop an antibiotic efficacy score.
Adds Edwards: “We can then rapidly determine which antibiotics will work very quickly based on that score. We’ll be doing this initially in blood samples, and we've already found that we can detect bacteria in simulated blood samples through an initial pilot study we did this year.
We have shifted focus from delivering a product per se: this is a prototype of an application
“The measured response occurs within seconds and for living cells shows a positive indication of life which is readily distinctive from background bacteria.
“A bloodstream infection can progress to sepsis every hour that septic infection is untreated, or if given an ineffective treatment, mortality rises by 8%.”
Current disk diffusion or plate count methods take approximately two to four days. The new technology can reduce it by at least two days.
“That means that the patient is getting the right antibiotic at the right time and the overheads in terms of testing logistics and clinical reporting are significantly reduced, as is the occupancy of beds. You’ve got benefits for the patient, the clinician, and the health service from implementing a shorter and more rapid antibiotic susceptibility test,” concludes Edwards.
Ian Bowkett is a writer and podcaster with more than a decade of experience in science education, and a practical science consultant for Ark Curriculum Plus
Warwick the spin maker
Cytecom’s gestation began in the thriving Midlands university network
Cytecom’s roots date to co-founder Conor Edwards’ involvement in laboratory experiments for a 2018 University of Warwick research paper: since 2011 the university has been the source of 45 spinouts, mentored through its subsidiary Warwick Innovations, formerly Warwick Ventures.
Says Edwards: “We started off without much experience in long-form product development etc, and learnt quite quickly where our knowledge holes were. We needed to make the electronics in a way that was both producible and small, so it could fit into a small device. We then developed the electronics and the optics in-house, such that we could have a portable shoebox-sized device from something that was several square feet in lab space.
“Warwick Ventures gave us free office space and helped us with the patenting etc of the technology from the get-go.
“From there we’ve had advice from them frequently about how to protect the IP and continue business development.”
The method: “Simply, we measure how much energy a cell has… taking pictures of the bacterial population, and part way through that imaging sequence we stimulate them. It’s based on the response to this electrical stimulation that we can detect living cells.
“The electrical stimulation forces open voltage-gated channels in the cell’s membrane and if they’re a healthy cell, that causes an efflux of the potassium ions inside.
“These positively charged ions then get replaced by a positively charged dye, making the cell brighter. In the inverse case, less than healthy cells cannot maintain that membrane potential gradient, i.e., they don’t have as many potassium ions inside the cell.
“Some residual dye can go into the cell and when we open the channel, as we did before, that residual dye leaves the cell, meaning they get dimmer, and there is a range of responses in between that we’re working on reporting.
“Not only can our test rapidly detect viable bacteria, but it is able to see the health state of that bacteria, which is something no other technology can do.”
