Sensititre Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing to Support VetLIRN Investigations

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

In 2012, FDA announced the Cooperative Agreement PA-12-194 CVM Vet-LRN Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory Program - (U18). The intent of this program was to support increased sample analysis in the event of animal food or drug related illnesses or other large-scale animal food/feed emergency events requiring surge capacity testing of implicated diagnostic or animal food sources. The program has been an unqualified success, and funds are used to fund case investigation activities for Vet-LIRN. Case investigations involve, but are not limited to, necropsy, clinical bloodwork, microbiological investigations, toxicology screens, histology, feed analysis, and shipping. The funds may also be used to purchase equipment (either fully or leveraged with other funds) used in Vet-LIRN investigations, equipment maintenance contracts, testing supplies for Vet-LIRN investigations and software needed for reporting results to Vet-LIRN. Such testing includes pathogen detection, identification, and traceback for outbreak investigations as well as characterization of antibiograms of clinical isolates. The microbiology lab at Ryan Veterinary Hospital is an in-hospital lab that processes over 7,000 companion animal patient specimens per year. We conduct antimicrobial susceptibility testing on over 5000 bacterial isolates per year. The lab has an extensive database (2002-date) that contains the results of every clinical isolate that was tested for antimicrobial susceptibility. The current instrumentation (Vitek 2 from Biomerieux) is frequently running at capacity. The purchase of a Sensititre ARIS 2X ID/AST system would very effectively increase our capacity to be fully engaged with the VetLIRN AST project. We are also currently a source lab for the whole genome sequencing project and because we use a VITEK rather than a Sensititre ARIS this means that the antimicrobial susceptibility data we submit is in a different format compared with all the other VetLIRN source labs. The ARIS could also be used in Vet- LIRN investigations. Case investigations frequently include pathogen detection, identification, and characterization of antibiograms of clinical isolates.