Contemporary AMR strain panels for diagnostics and therapeutics
Five new contemporary Gram-negative AMR strain panels, covering World Health Organization (WHO) priority pathogens and other clinically important Enterobacterales, to help innovators test diagnostics and therapeutics against what’s actually circulating in the clinic today.
What’s in the panels?
These panels were developed in partnership with the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) and its Antimicrobial Resistance and Healthcare Associated Infections (AMRHAI) Reference Unit. They comprise 145 isolates: 30 each of Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, carbapenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa and carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, plus 25 isolates across other clinically important Enterobacterales species.
Each isolate has been characterised phenotypically, through antibiotic susceptibility profiling, and genotypically, through whole-genome sequencing, with accompanying genomic and phenotypic data available online.
Built for diagnostics and therapeutics
The panels support both diagnostic and therapeutic development. Access to consistent, contemporary strain panels has long been a barrier for AMR innovators, and testing against a shared, well-characterised resource earlier in development helps reduce that risk, whichever stage of the pipeline a team is working in.
Globally relevant
Although the strains were sourced through UKHSA’s UK laboratory network, the panels were deliberately curated to reflect globally circulating sequence types, high-risk clones and important resistance mechanisms. They cover WHO priority pathogen–resistance combinations, as well as resistance profiles associated with high-burden infections including urinary tract infections, bloodstream infections and lower respiratory tract infections.
This is a resource for the international AMR research community as much as the UK one.
PACE portfolio teams have been using the new strain panels to validate their assets. Professor Jon Sayers, Principal Investigator, University of Sheffield commented:
“The PACE-UKHSA collaboration has given access to a much wider range of strains against which we’ve been able to test our compounds. The impact of that has been invaluable to our project. We’ve been able to test our compounds against additional organisms, and we are excited by the results we are seeing from that.”
How to access the collection
The panels are available now through UKHSA’s National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC) catalogue, and can be purchased as individual isolates or complete panels. The accompanying genomic and phenotypic data is freely available through EMBL-EBI’s BioSamples and the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA).
