CDC awards $26M for research on hospital ‘superbugs’

Several academic hospitals have been awarded $26 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to research new ways to prevent hospital-acquired infections (HAIs), particularly those resistant to antibiotics.

The research effort, called the Prevention Epicenters Program, will emphasize “holistic” and regional approaches to preventing those infections from spreading between healthcare facilities, according to the CDC.

Speaking at an event at Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center announcing the funding, Beth Bell, MD, MPH, the CDC’s director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, said work done under this same program has made several notable research discoveries.

“These prevention epicenters develop and test innovative approaches to preventing infections and improving patient safety in healthcare settings, including combating antibiotic resistance,” Bell said. “The new funding more than doubles previous awards and expands the capacity of the prevention epicenters to work with CDC in addressing antibiotic resistance.”

Past success have included prevention programs which have reduced patients’ risk of contracting bloodstream infections like carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in intensive and acute care facilities.

This round of funding will focus on predicting HAIs, like developing a computer program to detect a potential outbreak of infections by monitoring lab test data throughout a region, rather than only restricting tracking and prevention strategies to a single facility.  

Modeling their work on an existing HAI database required by the Illinois Department of Public Health, researchers may be able to pinpoint where infections are originating while also alerting facilities accepting infected patients who may need to be placed into isolation.

“It’ll protect that patient, in terms of treating and using the right antibiotics, and it’ll protect surrounding patients,” Robert A. Weinstein, MD, an infection control specialist at Rush, said to HealthExec. “As the numbers go up in an institution, the state will be able to dedicate its interventive activities to those institutions or facilities that have rising rates. Maybe 80 percent of the problem is occurring at 20 percent of the facilities, and the intervention will be directed at those 20 percent.”

Other areas which may be explored thanks to the CDC funding include finding out how ICUs become colonized with antibiotic-resistant germs and how restoring microbiomes could treat antibiotic-resistant infections.

Members of Congress from both parties were on hand at the event to offer their support to the program.

“What we are witnessing today is good stewardship,” said Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill. “Good stewardship of financial resources…that say let’s just not chase something down, but instead, let’s look back and see how we can mitigate and how we can prevent this from going on in the very near future.”

Along with Rush, prevention research will be funded at Duke University, the University of North Carolina, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, the University of California-Irvine, the University of Pennsylvania and Washington University (St. Louis). The program’s funding runs through 2020.