CatchBac-Nano: Multitarget Nanobeads for Rapid Bacterial Enrichment to Accelerate Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance and Diagnostics

Funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN).

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a profound global health threat, projected to contribute to tens of millions of deaths worldwide by 2050 without improved intervention. Rapid, pathogen-targeted antibiotic therapy substantially improves patient outcomes, but standard bacterial identification methods typically take more than 24 hours, forcing clinicians to rely on broad-spectrum, suboptimal treatments in the meantime. A key bottleneck is sample preparation: clinical samples are dominated by host cellular material, making it difficult to isolate the sparse bacterial content needed for rapid molecular diagnostics such as qPCR or sequencing.

This ongoing project, a collaboration between the University of Inland Norway  and NTNU's Particle Engineering Centre, addresses this challenge by developing "CatchBac-Nano" — a new class of magnetic nanobeads engineered with multifunctional peptide ligands that target multiple sites on the bacterial cell surface simultaneously. Unlike conventional single-target beads, which often struggle with strain variability and non-specific host binding, this multitarget approach is designed to achieve high recovery of a broad range of bacteria, including low-abundance pathogens, while more effectively depleting host contaminants from complex samples such as blood and urine.

If successful, CatchBac-Nano aims to serve as a rapid, standardized sample pre-processing step that could reduce bacterial infection diagnosis time to under 24 hours, supporting earlier, more targeted antimicrobial therapy. The project is also intended as a foundation for a future portable diagnostic platform focused on rapid pathogen diagnostics from a One Health perspective.