Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Joint replacement surgeries are very common medical interventions to replace arthritic or dysfunctional joint surfaces with orthopedic prostheses. They are used to alleviate the symptoms that are associated with Osteoarthritis (OA), Rheumatoid arthritis (RA), traumatized and malaligned joints. These primary prosthetic joints are susceptible to infection, which require a surgical revision that imposes increased health risks to the patient and costs to the healthcare system. Unfortunately, identifying the source of the infection in a timely manner is challenging which makes its clinical management difficult. In the backdrop of an aging population, we will require more robust tools that can help to identify the constituent members of these microbial communities to proactively mitigate their risk in the onset and progression of infection. To this end, we have partnered with Imperial College London, Drexel University and Waters Corporation to explore the feasibility of using state of the art mass spectrometry to study this microbial threat as a strategy to identify novel interventions and diagnostics to manage this clinical problem.