Sterile Blood Culture Collection Kit

Clinical Background

Blood cultures are performed tens of millions of times annually in the U.S. Blood cultures serve as diagnostic tests for bloodstream infections. They help clinicians select optimal antibiotics and determine the severity of a patient's infection. However, a significant limitation to blood culturing is the high frequency of specimen contamination with bacteria that normally live on patients' skin. Contaminated specimens cause false positive culture results and lead to unnecessary patient morbidity and healthcare costs due to unneeded antibiotics, unnecessary admissions and emergency department visits, and increased hospital lengths of stay.

A sterile blood culture collection kit can reduce the number of culture specimens that are contaminated. Compared to the usual equipment used to collect culture specimens, sterile kits may cost more for initial materials, but result in significant net savings from lower long-term costs due to a reduction in the number of contaminated cultures.

• Provides a strategy for collecting blood cultures that mitigates false positives.
• Provides a kit with necessary and familiar elements to collect blood.
• Provides a method that minimizes contamination based on strict attention to sterile technique.
• Minimally interferes with normal workflow.

Scientists at Vanderbilt have developed a sterile kit to collect blood cultures that results in substantially fewer contaminated cultures compared to the current standard of care for collecting culture specimens.

U.S. Filed Provisional Application: 61/541,639. We are seeking a licensing partner for further development and commercialization.