Bacteromic – a member of the Scope Fluidics S.A. Capital Group – has received a conditional decision from the European Patent Office (EPO) to grant a patent on the innovative solution applied in the BacterOMIC system, the geometry of a single incubation segment in a microfluidic chip for microbiological tests. This is the second European patent granted this year for the BacterOMIC system technology. The company pursues to protect several solutions, also on other continents.
The patent protection of the BacterOMIC project includes exclusive rights to the technology applied in the chip to identify and test antibiotic resistance. Each segment may contain an antibiotic (or a combination of antibiotics) at a given concentration(s). A single chip contains a ground-breaking number of incubation segments. Thanks to the now-patented technology, it is possible to place as many as 640 reaction chambers in a single cartridge, thanks to which tests are conducted in parallel in 640 different antibiotic environments – as a result, it offers quantitative determination of the so-called minimum inhibition concentration (MIC) for all clinically relevant antibiotics and antibiotic combinations.
Microfluidic solutions are the core of the BacterOMIC system. We consistently implement the patent protection strategy for the entire system. The application concerning the incubation segment is a key patent which protects the BacterOMIC technology on the international market. The method developed by our team is so far unrivalled in the world, so we want to protect the solutions to the greatest extent possible– explains Dr Seweryn Bajer-Borstyn, Bacteromic product manager.
The technology applied in the BacterOMIC system employs a number of algorithmic methods that allow to quantify the drug susceptibility of bacteria. The system makes it possible to determine the effectiveness of all antibiotics in a single test. It also allows to identify the effective combination of antibiotics in pairs. The product provides even 10 times more information from a single test than competitive systems.
At the end of October, the Company reported that the BacterOMIC project, under which the patent was now obtained, had undergone prevalidation tests on clinical samples in a hospital laboratory. The results of the tests confirmed the correct functioning of the BacterOMIC system in the version that will be used in the production process. The company has been systematically expanding its antibiotic test set for many months in order to launch clinical trials of the system in Q1 2021.