Medical diagnostics company Panbio has advanced development of its homogeneous assay technology to minimise the effects of factors that might potentially cause interference in the assay
The company has engineered the beta-Lactam sub-fragments to all but eliminate the effects of antibiotics and a-Lactamase inhibitors on the performance of the systems under development.
Panbio's acting CEO, Stuart Hazell, commented: "From the beginning of this project Panbio was aware that there was a potential issue of interference with assay performance where a patient was taking antibiotics, particularly those containing beta-Lactamase inhibitors.
"We assessed our capacity to address this issue and are pleased that our strategies have generated excellent results".
This development involves a high level of innovation and will be protected through the filing of a provisional patent application with the Australian patent office.
The key advance in this development has been in the design of enzyme fragments that are resistant to beta-Lactamase inhibitors potentially present in serum samples from patients on antibiotic treatments and show no significant loss in enzymatic activity compared with the precursor fragments.
This development was necessary due to the increasing incidence of antibiotic resistance within pathogenic bacteria.
In medical practice, one strategy for overcoming the effect of resistance to beta-Lactam antibiotics (e.g penicillin) caused by bacteria expressing beta-Lactamase is the addition of beta-Lactamase inhibitors to the active drug.
Whil the prevalence of beta-Lactamase inhibitors in patient samples at any one time is very low, there is a risk that the presence of such inhibitors in a sample could reduce the performance of Panbio's homogeneous assay system.
Manager of Panbio's Advanced Technologies research team, Edward Kachab, was delighted with this progress.
"The new generation enzyme fragments will be incorporated in our prototype assay for pre-clinical evaluation.
"While a number of technical challenges remain, this development moves the assay one step closer to its ultimate commercial format," he said.
