International Partner Search

Innovation & Technology Offer

Quick detection of infectious living micro-organisms (or pathogens) without cell culture for medical or sanitary diagnosis offered by a French laboratory

Country of Origin: France
Reference Number: TOFR20181011001
Publication Date: 16 January 2019

Summary

A French laboratory has developed a new method to quickly identify and characterize any microorganism for medical applications.
Bacteria, fungi or others pathogens could be detected in less than five hours. This new tool is useful to save time to get a microbiota survey and to create consequently a fast and reliable antibiogram.
The French R&D institution is looking for industrial partners for a technical cooperation agreement or a license agreement.

Description

A French research team has developed a new method to analyse the microbiological samples quickly. This research team is represented by a technology transfer department established more than 70 years ago. 

This department is responsible for protecting and leveraging the intellectual property generated by a major R&D institution in the Paris region. 



The early detection and diagnosis of infection by microbial pathogens is crucial to discover a suitable therapy by identifying and characterizing the pathogens, notably in a personalized medicine context.



Quick detection without fastidious culturing steps of any pathogen is the major interest for patient health.

Indeed, the reference practice is the use of Petri dishes for the microbiological tests where it may take several days to detect bacteria or fungi.



The technology consists in molecular analysis which reassemble the present cells thanks to a specific and advanced software with a library for the self-learning process.

The technology is based on a reliable identification of pathogens by mass spectrometry to get a signature without any a priori of any kind of biological samples as blood, saliva, stools, urine, mucositis,... (even undescribed organisms to date)



The technology also allows identification of bacteria, archaea, fungi, yeast, parasites, plants and animals thanks to a new software linked to a specific database.

Consequently a quick antibiogram could be performed for pathogens, as well as a functional characterization.



Two use cases :

- pathogen detection by routine analysis for medical laboratories 

- quick diagnosis in case of sanitary crisis (virus infection or pollution by living micro-organisms)



The partner could be a company interested in :

- a license agreement as the R&D institution is willing to negotiate the patents rights for specific applications directly with the interested party, or

- a technical cooperation agreement.



The design of the Human Machine Interface (HMI) solution could be an outcome of the expected partner.

Advantages and Innovations

Currently no solution available on the market generates an overview a priori of the presence of microorganisms in a sample.



The advantages of this technology:

-no need of culture

-quick assay (answer in less than 5 h) 

-applicable on any sample, even unculturable microorganisms 

-applicable on limited amount of sample (few mg) 

-numerous examples to illustrate the range of applications 



The technology requires no prior knowledge of the pathogen details which is very useful for a sanitary crisis with an urgent need for diagnosis.

In this case, the action plan is optimized (quarantine, prevention, treatment administration,…)

This is a breakthrough innovation which characterizes pathogen types in details without getting an antibiogram by cell culture.

Stage Of Development

Prototype available for demonstration

Requested partner

The lab is targeting a company which is involved in business relations with hospitals or medical laboratories to complete the use cases, notably about the process of sample collection (in situ or not) via a technical cooperation agreement.



The partner sought could be also an information technology (IT) company to develop the human machine interface solution via a license agreement.



A laboratory visit could be organised to have a better understanding of this technology.