{"id":3378,"date":"2019-01-18T10:35:54","date_gmt":"2019-01-18T15:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qa.vet.purdue.edu\/news\/?p=3378"},"modified":"2026-05-13T11:39:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T15:39:19","slug":"new-nih-grant-helps-dr-mohamed-seleem-pursue-faster-method-for-diagnosing-blood-infections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/new-nih-grant-helps-dr-mohamed-seleem-pursue-faster-method-for-diagnosing-blood-infections.php","title":{"rendered":"New NIH Grant Helps Dr. Mohamed Seleem Pursue Faster Method for Diagnosing Blood Infections"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Dr.<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Mohamed Seleem, professor of microbiology in the Purdue Veterinary Medicine Department of Comparative Pathobiology, and his collaborator at Boston University have received a $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for their research to develop a faster means of diagnosing often lethal bloodstream infections.  Their approach also addresses the problem of antimicrobial resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloodstream infections are notoriously deadly \u2013 not because\nthey\u2019re untreatable, but because they work fast and are hard to diagnose. To\nfigure out what medication to give patients, doctors need to culture the\nbacteria or fungi causing the infection, which takes several days. In an\nattempt to treat the infection before results of the culture come back, doctors\noften give patients a drug cocktail, hoping that one of the medications in the\nbunch will cure the patient. Often, it doesn\u2019t, and the practice contributes to\nthe increasing prevalence of antimicrobial resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mortality rates are high, as bloodstream infections kill\nmore than 600 people<\/a> each\nday in the United States. Dr. Seleem is trying to change that with a faster\nmethod for diagnosing these infections. \n\u201cWe created a method that uses a blood sample from patients, and in 20\nminutes identifies what kind of infection they have and what antibiotic or\nantifungal medication we should give them,\u201d Dr. Seleem said. \u201cDoing this\nwithout giving patients the wrong treatment or creating antimicrobial\nresistance is really novel.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Antimicrobial resistance happens when a microorganism is\nable to stop a medication from working against it. As a result, standard\ntreatments become ineffective, infections persist and continue to spread.\nWithout effective antibiotics, major surgeries and chemotherapy become\nextremely high-risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Seleem\u2019s new diagnostic tool images the infection and\nidentifies it from the rest of the cells and bacteria in the blood. Once he\nfinds the bacterium he\u2019s looking for, he can go inside it and analyze it. The findings\nwere published in the journal Analytical\nChemistry<\/a>.  \u201cLike each person\nhas an individual fingerprint, each bacterium has a single fingerprint that\u2019s\nspecific to that infection,\u201d Dr. Seleem said. \u201cWe created a library with the\nfingerprint of each infection, that way, we can quickly identify what kind of\ninfection the patient has.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The original study considered only a single bacterium. Now, Dr.\nSeleem wants to make the technique more efficient and verify that it works on\nthe six most common bloodstream infections. With help from his collaborator,\nDr. Ji-Xin Cheng, professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, and\nthe new NIH grant, he\u2019s working toward these goals.  \u201cThe mortality rate is very high because\npatients can die from this in a few hours,\u201d Dr. Seleem said. \u201cFinding a fast,\nefficient diagnostic tool is in high demand. We could save a lot of lives.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Seleem\u2019s research aligns with Purdue’s Giant Leaps celebration, which acknowledges the University’s global advancements in health, longevity and quality of life as part of Purdue’s 150th anniversary. This is one of the four themes of the yearlong celebration’s Ideas Festival, designed to showcase Purdue as an intellectual center solving real-world problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The technology is patented through the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Mohamed Seleem, professor of microbiology in the Purdue Veterinary Medicine Department of Comparative Pathobiology, and his collaborator at Boston University have received a $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for their research to develop a faster means of diagnosing often lethal bloodstream infections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":3396,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,37,29,11],"tags":[918,919,123,602,56,171,150,25],"class_list":["post-3378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty-staff","category-infectious-diseases-and-immunology","category-our-people","category-research","tag-antimicrobial-resistance","tag-blood-infections","tag-cpb","tag-giant-leaps","tag-homepage","tag-mohamed-seleem","tag-research","tag-top-story"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3378"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33855,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3378\/revisions\/33855"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}