UNMET NEED
• Antibiotic resistance crisis is driven by extensive and inappropriate usage of antibiotics and is predicted to result in an annual death toll of 10 million people by 2050. The ability to provide a rapid and accurate surveillance and diagnosis of multiple-drug resistant (MDR) bacteria is pivotal to the efficiency of controlling the growing crisis. The use of monoclonal antibody- based biosensor is a novel promising rapid diagnostic tool for improved clinical management of the growing crisis.
• There is a growing need of rapid and reliable diagnostic tools for bacterial agents’ identification at point-of-care (POC) to improve clinical management of patients and prevent transmission of infectious diseases in the community as well as preventing antibiotic resistance developed as a result of miss-use of antibiotics.
OUR SOLUTION
• An innovative bacterial protein (T3SS) diagnostic tool comprises of a novel mAb-Esp-B7 integrated to an electrochemical biosensor.
• The biosensor demonstrates high specificity and sensitivity capabilities detecting pathogenic bacterial T3SS-associated antigens as well as intact bacteria.
• This technology is “game changing” since it has the ability to differentiate between commensal and pathogenic bacterial strains with demonstrated rapid, high specificity and sensitivity capabilities.

ADVANTAGE OVER EXISTING TECHNOLOGIES
• The novel mAb-Esp-B7 biosensor will provide a more rapid, cost-effective and sensitive diagnostic tool that can identify infective agents at the point-of-care (POC), without the requirement for multistep processing.
• This new technology will replace the current low sensitivity and specificity laboratory-based diagnostics that require long processing times, specialized expensive equipment and highly trained personnel.
STATUS
• We developed a novel monoclonal antibody mAb-EspB-B7 that targets EspB, an essential protein for bacterial infectivity within the bacterial type3 secretion system (T3SS).
• The selected epitope for mAb-EspB-B7 is conserved across several T3SS-harboring pathogens, thus enables to differentiate between commensal and pathogenic strains.
• The antibody demonstrates high affinity and specificity towards recombinant and native EspB proteins, it is stable over a range of pH levels, temperature and salt concentrations; and preserves its functionality in human serum.
• The integrated mAb-EspB-B7-biosensor exhibits excellent performance recognizing both soluble EspB and in the context of the whole bacteria.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
A provisional patent application was submitted