The Uppsala based company spoke at the Novel Antimicrobials and AMR Diagnostics Conference in Berlin, and stressed the importance of adopting new diagnostic approaches in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.

Gradientech is the developer of the QuickMIC rapid IVD system for antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST).

The impact of antibiotic resistance is perhaps seen most clearly in the continuing rise in deaths from infections due to bacteria resistant to antibiotics – at least 33,000 annually in Europe alone.

“The World Health Organization has already called for a new generation of rapid microbiology tests to determine which antibiotics an infected patient should be treated with to reduce misuse and overuse of antibiotics and limit the spread of resistance,” says Sara Thorslund, CEO of Gradientech. “We foresee that our IVD QuickMIC system, which is in final development, will make a real difference by diagnosing bacterial resistance in patients with suspected sepsis in as short as 2 hours based on bacterial growth.”