“Using that information, health care providers can ensure patients are being treated with the right antibiotic and gain a greater knowledge of antimicrobial resistance,” says Dr. Purssell. “If we can understand the underlying mechanisms of resistance, we can choose strategies that are the most effective in countering them.”With the threat of antimicrobial resistance ever increasing, Dr. Andrew Purssell fights back against harmful bacteria by developing new diagnostics that quickly identify and characterize pathogens.

He’s often racing against the clock: it can take up to five days for a culture to reveal the pathogen causing an infection and determine what antibiotics are effective, a tricky situation as some patients only have hours to find the right treatment. However, Dr. Purssell and his team have pioneered a technique that can predict treatments in just two and a half hours by comparing extracted bacterial DNA sequences to a database of local pathogens.

“Using that information, health care providers can ensure patients are being treated with the right antibiotic and gain a greater knowledge of antimicrobial resistance,” says Dr. Purssell. “If we can understand the underlying mechanisms of resistance, we can choose strategies that are the most effective in countering them.”

In addition to being a newly appointed associate scientist with the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute’s Inflammation and Chronic Disease Program, Dr. Pursell is also a transplant infectious disease specialist at The Ottawa Hospital and assistant professor and new investigator chair at the University of Ottawa.