Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

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.