What is Mykrobe?

Microbial DNA encapsulates an incredible amount of information which we can use, both at a global scale — tracking the spread of bacterial strains — and at the most local and personal level for diagnosis of a patient.

We build tools to make these available to all, primarily focussing on the biggest infectious disease, which infects more than 10 million people per year: tuberculosis.

How does Mykrobe work?

Mykrobe analyses the whole genome of a bacterial sample, all within a couple of minutes, and predicts which drugs the infection is resistant to. It has been heavily validated on thousands of samples, is free, no expertise is needed to run or interpret it, and it works offline, on a standard desktop or laptop.

What sequencers does Mykrobe support?

Mykrobe supports both the traditional sequencing machine (Illumina), which tends to need a large hospital or lab and a lot of infrastructure, and also the new handheld sequencers (nanopore), which are very portable, and moving towards production readiness.

Where is Mykrobe used?

We have been trialling Mykrobe both in England (where currently every TB sample gets illumina-sequenced and passed through Mykrobe) and with collaborators using nanopore devices in Madagascar, Vietnam, and India.

Further details

There are publications detailing Mykrobe capabilities here: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10063

Global

In the modern age, where we can search the entire internet, we should be able to monitor global TB in real-time. There are two major public health wins if we can do this:

1. Bacterial DNA contains markers which allow you to spot whether infections are likely to be due to direct transmission, or totally unrelated. Thus we ought to be able to take the bacterial DNA from a patient, and compare with all the TB in the world, and see if there is a local outbreak or whether this patient has the same strain as was recently seen in another country/city.

2. Drug resistance in M. tuberculosis (the bacteria that causes TB) is a major global health threat, and is growing. There is an urgent need to be able to monitor the burden of resistance.

Until recently it has been inconceivable to work at this scale. We recently developed the underlying technology to do this (published in Nature Biotechnology here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-018-0010-1, open access link here: https://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/12/15/234955). Working with collaborators across the world, we are building a live online tool automating all of this.