Determining incubation regime article wins George Sykes Memorial Award
The Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Sciences Society (PHSS) awarded its 2014 George Sykes Memorial Award to Andrew Sage, Nadine Timas and David Jones of Rapid Micro Biosystems
In late December, the Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Sciences Society (PHSS) awarded the 2014 George Sykes Memorial Award to Andrew Sage, Nadine Timas and David Jones of Rapid Micro Biosystems for their scientific paper entitled, 'Determining incubation regime and time to results for automated rapid microbiology EM methods'.
The paper was published in the European Journal of Parenteral and Pharmaceutical Sciences 2014 Volume 19 Number 2. The PHSS presents the George Sykes Award for the best scientific article published in the journal over the course of the year. The International Review and Editorial Board casts the votes for the best piece.
The winning article abstract reads:
The use of growth-based rapid microbiology methods (RMMs) requires a time to result (TTR) to be determined with a defined incubation regime in order to obtain accurate results and take full advantage of potential time-savings provided by the RMM. A case study involving an environmental monitoring (EM) application to illustrate the simple process was performed using the automated Growth Direct System.
Recovery of a suite of in-house bacterial and mould isolates was examined at different incubation profiles to define the optimal regime to obtain the best recovery. Of the three, serial incubation at 22.5°C followed by 32.5°C was identified as optimal for the recovery of both the bacteria and mould. A TTR of 72h for this incubation profile was calculated, and the accuracy of the TTR was confirmed by comparison of the Growth Direct result with spread controls of the test organisms followed by equivalence testing versus the standard method using EM samples.
An alternative regime of a single temperature of 28°C was subsequently examined, and resulted in a 60h TTR, and comparable recovery versus the control spread plates indicating that this may be a viable alternative to serial incubation.
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