Employing Clinical Metagenomics for Improved Uropathogen Detection

Can NGS-based clinical metagenomics outperform standard urine culture for comprehensive uropathogen detection and antibiotic resistance prediction? Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are common, leading to 10 million office visits per year. Quick and accurate identification of uropathogens and antimicrobial susceptibility is critical to the management of UTIs as well as prevention of increased antimicrobial resistance. Today’s standard urine culture is limited in scope where up to 20% of women will have a negative urine culture despite showing symptoms. Standard urine culture and susceptibility can take up to 1 week, delaying appropriate UTI management.

Clinical metagenomics enables culture-free, hypothesis-free detection and identification of uropathogens and genetic markers of antibiotic resistance. By coupling the power of Illumina’s next-generation sequencing and IDbyDNA’s robust Explify analytics solutions, a streamlined specimen-to-report workflow can be performed in 24 hours resulting in comprehensive uropathogen detection.

Robert Schlaberg, MD, PhD, MPH
Co-Founder, Chief Medical Officer
IDbyDNA

Mehdi Keddache, PhD
Executive Sales Specialist, Microbiology
Illumina