SENSITITRE ANTIMICROBIAL SUSCEPTIBILITY TESTING TO SUPPORT VETLIRN INVESTIGATIONS

In 2012, FDA announced the Cooperative Agreement PA-12-194 CVM Vet-LRNVeterinary Diagnostic Laboratory Program - (U18). The intent of this program was tosupport increased sample analysis in the event of animal food or drug related illnessesor other large-scale animal food/feed emergency events requiring surge capacity testingof implicated diagnostic or animal food sources. The program has been an unqualifiedsuccess, and funds are used to fund case investigation activities for Vet-LIRN. Caseinvestigations involve, but are not limited to, necropsy, clinical bloodwork,microbiological investigations, toxicology screens, histology, feed analysis, andshipping. The funds may also be used to purchase equipment (either fully or leveragedwith other funds) used in Vet-LIRN investigations, equipment maintenance contracts,testing supplies for Vet-LIRN investigations and software needed for reporting results toVet-LIRN. Such testing includes pathogen detection, identification, and traceback foroutbreak investigations as well as characterization of antibiograms of clinical isolates. The microbiology lab at Ryan Veterinary Hospital is an in-hospital lab thatprocesses over 7,000 companion animal patient specimens per year. We conductantimicrobial susceptibility testing on over 5000 bacterial isolates per year. The lab hasan extensive database (2002-date) that contains the results of every clinical isolate thatwas tested for antimicrobial susceptibility. The current instrumentation (Vitek 2 fromBiomerieux) is frequently running at capacity. The purchase of a Sensititre ARIS 2XID/AST system would very effectively increase our capacity to be fully engaged with theVetLIRN AST project. We are also currently a source lab for the whole genomesequencing project and because we use a VITEK rather than a Sensititre ARIS thismeans that the antimicrobial susceptibility data we submit is in a different formatcompared with all the other VetLIRN source labs. The ARIS could also be used in Vet-LIRN investigations. Case investigations frequently include pathogen detection,identification, and characterization of antibiograms of clinical isolates.