Medical scientist Dr Kieran Mulroney and his team are tantalisingly close to launching new technology that could save the lives of many of the 1.27 million people around the world who die each year from infections resistant to antibiotics.
Biotech start-up Cytophenix, led by researcher Dr Mulroney, of the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, has been awarded a second $500,000 grant from CSIRO biotech incubator CUREator to help get the FloCAST diagnostic tool to market.
The Artificial Intelligence-powered diagnostic tool will help physicians prescribe the correct antibiotics for bacterial infections within hours rather than days, saving lives and helping to combat antibiotic resistance globally.
“We are using antibiotics more and antibiotic resistance is worsening,” he said.
“Take sepsis, a blood stream infection – the only way you survive is if the antibiotic you are given is effective on the bug.
“Doctors at the moment are using broad spectrum antibiotics saying they don’t know what the infection is, so these are the ones that are most likely to work.
“But resistance gets worse and more and more often the initial diagnosis is wrong.
“The current process is you take a blood sample and send it to the pathology lab. They culture the sample and will say if there is a bug – and what it is once it has grown.
“And then they can do a test to say these are the antibiotics that are going to work – and that can take two to five days.
“If you have a blood-stream infection you have nearly a seven per cent risk of death for every hour that you don’t get the right antibiotic.
“What we are doing with FloCAST is we take that blood sample and the actual tests take less than four hours to run. It means we can get the results back in the same day.
“Even if that first guess is wrong before the second dose of antibiotics is due the doctors have the tools they need to get it right.
“You get the results back when there is still a chance to save someone’s life.”
Getting FloCAST to market has been a long process that started when Dr Mulroney was a PhD student working with two fellow inventors back in 2015. He is hopeful that it will finally get to market in the next two years.
Dr Mulroney says it would certainly have been an easier path for him to pursue a medical career.
“It’s an interesting pathway for me in that when I was young, I always thought medicine was where I wanted to be. I wanted to help people, be out there solving problems, all those sorts of good things.
“And then as I grew up and got out into the world and worked for a while, I realised my talents were better used solving problems. I wanted to look at the ways that we can change the system to help everyone rather than help just one person at a time.
Dr Mulroney said he was lucky enough to come from a privileged background with a private school education.
“I’m a rich kid at the end of the day, and I had the opportunity to do whatever I wanted, but what I wanted was to make the world a better place. That was what led me on that path.”
That path started for Dr Mulroney with university which gave him the foundations to build on. He returned to university and started studying again for an undergraduate degree when he was around 28 years old.
He says his motivation comes from finding a problem, something that really matters, that you can specialise in, that will take you where you want to go, what you want to do.
“It wasn’t until I met a really influential lecturer who posed this challenge about antibiotic resistance and what that was going to look like in the future, that suddenly I realised that was where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do.
“It wasn’t a light bulb moment. It was a little bit of a gradual shift to start with.
“As you learn more and you start to understand the way that we’ve built our knowledge about the world around us, you also start to see the holes in our knowledge.
“When I found out just how bad the problems around antibiotic resistance were getting, that’s when that switch flipped for me.
“Every year about 1.3 million people globally die from a resistant infection. They have an acute infection with a resistant microorganism – a bacteria or a fungus – and they die as a result of that.
“But if you go and look at people who have had one of these highly resistant infections and survived, that number is more like five million every year.”
Dr Mulroney says it is difficult working from WA.
“A lot of people want to tell you, ‘oh, you should pack up, you should go to Boston, or you should go to Silicon Valley or Zurich, or the money’s over there, you’ll get everything you need, it’ll be great’. But for us, the West Australian community has been such a big part of the journey and so supportive of what we’ve done, that we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to keep the technology grounded in the local community.
“There’s more money, there’s more expertise overseas, but we wanted to stay local, we wanted to stay in Western Australia and we want to keep giving back to the community that supported us. So we’ve balanced those challenges as we’re going, but it is an issue that the West Australian government is doing their best to address,” he said.
