A Radical Approach To Diagnosing Infection

Introduction The cornerstone of sepsis management requires identifying the causative pathogen and initiating appropriate antimicrobial therapy. Current pathogen detection relies on culture techniques, a technology that is over 100 years old, slow and unreliably. It is not unusual for only 10% of critical care blood cultures to be positive. Due to the low yield and time taken to obtain a result, they rarely alter patient management. A novel molecular pathogen detection system, known as IRIDICA, employs polymerase chain reaction and electro spray ionisation mass spectroscopy (PCR/ESI-MS) to identify over 1000 pathogens, direct from sample without culture and within 8 hours. The RADICAL study was created to assess this technology in a real world critical care environment.