MALDI-Tof Biotyper System

LSTM was among the first institutions in the world to recognise the importance of studying and understanding the phenomenon of drug resistance. Pioneers such as Professor Warrington Yorke, the first Walter Myers Chair of Parasitology, established in 1929 in vitro cultivation of drug resistant trypanosomes, the parasite causing sleeping sickness, in order to understand the mode of action of new drugs. More recently, LSTM has been expanding its research portfolio within the antibiotic discovery and antibiotic resistance fields primarily focusing on bacteria within multiple externally funded clinical, epidemiological and diagnostic studies and within the core antimicrobial discovery activities of the UKRI funded Infection Innovation Consortium (iiCON).
The increased volume of research now demands rapid bacterial species identification across multiple projects which is unachievable using our standard 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing and therefore we require the high throughput capacity of a Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization (MALDI)-Time-Of-Flight (TOF) Mass Spectrometer Biotyping System from Bruker UK Ltd. The ability to be able to identify multiple bacterial isolates to species level will enable us to maintain our position at the forefront of AMR and drug discovery research and will lead to translatable results faster and cheaper.

LSTM's expanding AMR research portfolio now requires the ability to rapidly identify hundreds of bacterial isolates at any one time. This is, in part, due to the multiple externally funded projects which are currently ongoing. In terms of epidemiology we have projects based overseas and in the UK investigating clinical and household environments, hospital wastewater, and industrial, urban and environmental sites. Within all of these projects the rapid identification of bacterial species at scale is integral to moving the projects forward in terms of which bacteria to prioritise downstream AMR investigations.
In terms of drug discovery projects we have an environmental isolate library of microorganisms which is currently >50,000 individual isolates and the rapid determination of species ID for our hit isolates (those with desired antimicrobial activity) would allow us to triage which bacteria to prioritise for downstream biochemical analysis in order to maximise the likelihood of discovering novel chemistry. This approach is central to our de-replication strategy of finding novel antimicrobials rather than rediscovering old ones.