Lee Harrison, MD, has been awarded funding of $427,380 for a two-year R21 grant by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIH/NIAID) entitled “Tracking plasmid spread and transmission in the hospital: A novel tool for infection prevention and control.” This proposal was submitted in response to the competitive funding announcement entitled “NIH Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Program (Parent R21 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)” under funding opportunity number PA-20-195. This research represents a very close collaboration between the Harrison lab, the Van Tyne lab, and Graham Snyder and his Infection Prevention & Control team.

Despite recent progress in reducing the incidence of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 687,000 HAIs occurred in U.S. acute care hospitals in 2015 and that the HAI prevalence on a given day was one in 30 patients. An estimated 72,000 patients died with HAIs during their hospitalization. Outbreaks in hospitals remain a serious problem but the vast majority of hospitals use antiquated and ineffective methods to detect them. Dr. Harrison and his laboratory established the Enhanced Detection System for Healthcare Acquired Transmission (EDS-HAT), which combines bacterial whole genome sequencing (WGS) surveillance (as opposed to reactive WGS) to detect outbreaks with data mining (DM) of the electronic health record (EHR) and machine learning (ML) to identify the responsible transmission routes. 

Plasmids carried by bacteria frequently encode genes that confer resistance to antimicrobial agents. When patients or hospital environments are co-colonized with two bacterial species, these settings provide the opportunity for plasmid transfer to occur from a species carrying a plasmid to one that does not. The species with the newly acquired plasmid can then be transmitted to another patient, a combination of events called transfer to transmission (T2T). Importantly, T2T events are not captured by traditional WGS analysis or EDS-HAT. In this study, Dr. Harrison and his team will leverage the success and infrastructure of EDS-HAT by developing methods for detection of T2T events and determining the potential utility of incorporating surveillance for these events into EDS-HAT. This research is highly translational and will improve patient safety through incorporation of innovative genomic and computational approaches for identifying otherwise unrecognized T2T events.

Congratulations, Lee!