Hebrew University Researchers Develop Test to Help Fight Superbugs

The Fellowship  |  January 21, 2020

A team of researchers at Hebrew University can test to see whether bacteria will develop tolerance to certain antibiotic treatments prior to giving them to patients, reports the Times of Israel. This means doctors can better predict which treatment will work for them:

The pattern that they found was similar to their lab findings: the patients’ bacteria developed tolerance, then resistance, and ultimately antibiotic treatment failed.

In the short term, Balaban and Bar-Meir said the study offers new hope for patients with life-threatening infections and that medical centers should to adopt the laboratory test they developed to gauge antibiotic tolerance.

The test would enable doctors to quickly and easily detect whether a patient’s bacteria is tolerant of a planned antibiotic treatment before it’s administered, they said in a statement.