MICROBIAL TECHNOLOGY
Revolution in genomics and microbiology: the impact of technology
The Genomic & Microbiology Revolution: In Technology we Trust? was the title of the 37th Annual Microbiology Conference of the British Society for Microbial Technology, held at the RAF Museum at Hendon on 19 July. A fascinating programme looked at a range of different aspects of technology applied to microbiology, here summarised by Mark Wilks on behalf of the BSMT committee.
Technology is often understood in a very narrow sense such as the introduction of automation to what was a manual process. When this happens, the benefits are normally obvious immediately and very often cost-effective. For example, who would want to go back to manually inspecting blood culture bottles for signs of bacterial growth? Although we should note that even applying technology
to this simple process has its own pitfalls as it requires the development of sophisticated algorithms to monitor bacterial growth. These can be confused by delays in transporting blood culture bottles to the laboratory prior to incubation, which upsets the expected increases in turbidity that are expected to occur when the culture is being incubated at 37°C.
The Health Technology Assessment
(HTA) arm of the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) takes a much broader view of the term technology. For the NIHR, technology assessment could mean not just studying the effectiveness of a particular technology such as MALDI- TOF but the assessment of a particular product, such as an antibiotic or probiotic. Here, a yoghurt containing a probiotic is a technology.
The Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon, venue and backdrop to the BSMT Annual Microbiology Conference.
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Adapting to effectiveness Our first speaker was Professor Paul Dark, an Intensivist from Manchester, and the National Deputy Medical Director of the NIHR Clinical Research Network, who has led a number of very large investigations of the effectiveness of different technologies, many supported by the HTA. He concentrated on reviewing efforts made to develop the best evidence for effective molecular diagnostic technologies in the diagnosis and management of sepsis as well as fungal infections by describing several different trials that are currently running. The common thread of these trials is what is often termed ‘of very high quality’. For example, the research question is very carefully defined and the study is sufficiently powered to provide a useful answer. These studies also always involve a substantial health economics aspect,
SEPTEMBER 2022
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