Real-time pneumonia test for Covid-19 patients aiding faster therapy

An ongoing UCL-led research study, which quickly identifies the cause of a patient's pneumonia, enabling earlier optimisation of treatment, is being re-purposed to assist with the coronavirus pandemic. Pneumonia is one of the main symptoms of severe Covid-19 disease and, because many critically ill Covid-19 patients can no longer breathe by themselves they are put onto mechanical ventilators. These pump air through a tube into the lungs, helping the patient to survive. However, unfortunately the ventilation also increases the risk of bacteria entering the lungs, establishing a further infection known as 'secondary pneumonia'. INHALE Study Investigator, Dr Vicky Enne, Senior Research Fellow at UCL Infection & Immunity, said: " Bacterial pneumonias need urgent antibiotic treatment and left untreated can cause death: administering the right antibiotics as quickly as possible at diagnosis is therefore critical to survival. "Unfortunately it takes 2 to 3 days to grow the bacteria in the laboratory, so it's conventional to start with broad-spectrum antibiotics, active against many types of bacteria, then to refine treatment once the lab results come through. "To significantly reduce this delay our study aims to accurately identify the bacteria in under an hour, thereby allowing doctors to pinpoint the best antibiotic in quick time." The INHALE trial, conducted by UCL, University of East Anglia and Norwich Clinical Trials Unit, is evaluating cutting-edge 'molecular diagnostics' to identify bacteria directly from pneumonia patients' sputum (fluid produced in lungs), without the need for lab culture.