Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects

Bacterial infections cause millions of infections and take tens of thousands of lives every year,*and without antibiotics the death toll would skyrocket. Unfortunately, antibiotics are rapidly*becoming less effective due to the evolution of resistance. On top of this, doctors often have a*difficult time identifying what drugs will be most effective against infecting pathogens a timely*manner. For these reasons there is desperate need for new antimicrobial diagnostic methods*that can rapidly provide physicians accurate information to guide their treatments. One very*promising new approach to this problem is to sequence the genomes of the infecting*pathogens and use this information predict how they will respond to treatment. We propose to*produce genome sequence data and use sophisticated genome-wide association and*predictive modeling methods to develop a new antimicrobial diagnostic tool. We will*specifically focus on stopping a bacterial pathogen called Pseudomonas aeruginosa that*causes a disproportionate number of hospital infections and deaths. We will work in*collaboration with our partners at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto to generate this*state-of-the-art diagnostic tool and then develop procedures to move it into the clinic. The*success of this project will speed diagnosis, improve patient care, reduce healthcare costs,*and enhance stewardship of antibiotics; thereby, preserving their efficacy for the future.