Opportunity

Contributing to approximately $6 billion in direct health care costs each year, Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs) are the second most common infectious disease worldwide. While UTIs can range wildly in severity, they contribute significantly to cases of hospital sepsis: a life-threatening medical event caused by highly progressed infections. UTIs can also lead to various other adverse effects if left untreated, including kidney infections, prostate infections, and adverse pregnancy outcomes. Early diagnosis and treatment of UTIs is crucial to patient safety. Often, in order to treat the specific bacteria causing the UTI, health care providers must perform bacterial cultures.

Despite populations in rural and developing areas having a high prevalence of UTIs, healthcare infrastructure in these locations can often lack the laboratory resources to precisely diagnose and treat UTIs. In these cases, treatment often relies upon symptom reporting and basic urinalysis, which can lead to improper antibiotic use, antibiotic resistance, and lingering or worsening illness.  An alternative method for precisely detecting the presence of UTI-causing bacteria may massively help increase access to UTI diagnosis and care, as well as improve the growing epidemic of antibiotic resistance.

Breakthrough in UTI Diagnostic Technology

Researchers at the University of South Alabama have developed a reliable, low-cost method and kit in order to test patient blood and urine for UTI-causing bacteria. Drinking water test kits are primarily used as a fast, flexible, low-cost method of identifying disease-causing bacteria in drinking water. However, there is considerable overlap between the hazardous bacteria species the water test kits identify and the most common UTI-causing bacteria species.

Through a method of preparing either a blood or urine sample and inoculating a bag of sterile water, then incubating the sample with the kit, the presence of common UTI-causing bacteria can be identified. The species of bacteria present in the sample is dependent upon color change and fluorescence. Once the sample of blood or urine is determined to contain the diagnostic concentration of a certain species of coliform bacteria, the patient can be diagnosed with a UTI or with bacteremia and treated precisely.

Competitive Advantages

• The kit allows for reliable, low-cost diagnosis to more effective treatment of UTIs and bacteremia, especially in rural or underdeveloped areas;
• The diagnostic process does not require a laboratory setting or extensively trained personnel, greatly reducing cost and maximizing the capability of care;
• Providing specific bacteria species in the diagnosis can help combat antibiotic resistance from improper prescriptions where health care resources are limited;
• Diagnostic method can identify both a UTI and bacteremia so long as both a urine and blood sample is obtained from one patient: not only can the bacterial UTI be precisely identified, but its severity can be estimated simultaneously.