Door Jasmine Coppens (UAntwerpen)

Infections caused by Gram-positive bacteria represent an enormous health burden in the community as well as in hospitals. Remarkably, there are a few ‘pandemic’ clones that have spread worldwide and are recognized as the ‘disease-causing’ clones. Here, we will use next-generation sequencing to differentiate and dissect the microevolution among the pathogenic, and mostly multi-drug resistant clones isolated from countries e.g. India, Serbia and Denmark, and compared to Belgian isolates of the same species. Further we will focus on S. aureus in the clinical context, as we study S. aureus as an important causative agent of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP), and a comparison of novel, rapid diagnostics with the currently-used culture-based approaches to accurately detect respiratory tract colonization with S. aureus in mechanically ventilated patients, that can be used for early and targeted antibiotic treatment or even an initiation of a novel alpha-toxin-targeting, antibody-based eradication strategy.