HP Innovation Journal Issue 11: Winter 2018 | Page 24

I
n 2016, a 70-year-old Nevada woman came home from India
with a frightening stowaway: a persistent infection. After
being admitted to the hospital, she was administered 14 dif-
ferent antibiotics, but unfortunately, none were effective and
within two months, she died of septic shock. Investigators,
from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
found that this nightmare bacterium was a CRE superbug, a
strain of bacteria that has developed resistance to even the
newest and most powerful class of antibiotics.
Antibiotics became a keystone of modern medicine when
penicillin was introduced during World War II. Deadly
conditions such as pneumonia could be treated effectively,
and people with wounds small and large no longer risked
blood poisoning from bacterial contamination. Antibiotics
enabled the field of modern surgery to blossom, and people
started living longer lives.
But today many of the microbes—microorganisms like
bacteria—that cause common diseases and infections
are evolving resistance to the drugs used to treat them.
Scientists are now racing against the
clock to find new ways to fight these
drug-resistant superbugs.
PILOT PROGRAM
The CDC’s Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Challenge is an
initiative that encourages organizations around the world—
including governments, private businesses and NGOs—
to make commitments to fight antimicrobial resistance and
help develop the next generation of lifesaving antibiotics.
In 2018, HP joined the AMR challenge with a CDC pilot
program in four labs around the country that use HP’s
D300e Digital Dispenser BioPrinters to “print”
pharmaceutical samples and accelerate the testing of new
antibiotics that can fight resistant bacteria.
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HP Innovation Journal Issue 11
This program means the labs can give their local hospitals
the capability to immediately determine if a bacteria is resis-
tant or susceptible to a new antibiotic.
HP recently developed a way to adapt its inkjet printer
technology for biomedical research. HP’s inkjet technology
enables printers to drop tiny dots of ink from multiple
nozzles at rapid speed to quickly deposit the ink on paper.
That same technology can be used in labs.
“The printer dispenses tiny drops that are one thousand
times smaller in volume than researchers can dispense by
hand,” explains Erica Squires, applications scientist at HP.
“It allows them to take these manual processes that use large
volumes of liquid and miniaturize and automate them by
having the dispensing done by the printer.”
The HP D300e Digital Dispenser provides a way to automate
the dispensing of research compounds into test tube arrays
so scientists can study complex drug combinations more
accurately in a fraction of the time. (In addition to the CDC’s
antibiotics research, the D300e works for a wide range of
applications, from cutting-edge cancer research to new
treatments for HIV and Ebola).
“The CDC performed a validation of our instrument to
ensure it performs equivalently to previous methods that
they’ve tested before,” says Squires. “They passed all of those
validations with flying colors.”