Lighting up the Lung to treat infection - the Proteus Project

Diseases that attack the lungs are some of the most common in the world: asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia are just a few examples. Currently, diagnosing bacterial infections relies on a slow process of detection followed by biopsy and lab-based culture growth – procedures that are prone to contamination and can result in late treatment. A quick in vivo, in situ method is therefore vital to minimise the disruption to both the analysis and the patient’s wellbeing, and one consortium of scientists are well on their way to developing a novel, multi-layered approach to this – the Proteus project.

Proteus is a major EPSRC funded “Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration” (IRC), with major investment from the EPSRC (£11.3M) and the 3 consortium Universities (£3M).

The project was launched in October 2013 and consists of three collaborating institutions: the University of Edinburgh, Heriot Watt University and the University of Bath.  It is led by Professors Kev Dhaliwal and Mark Bradley, both based in the University of Edinburgh.

Multidisciplinary team

Working directly for Proteus are some 18 postdoctoral researchers and 20 PhD students across 10 research groups, brought together to work towards the common goal of revolutionising how lung diseases are diagnosed and managed within the Intensive Care environment, where patients are most at risk of respiratory failure and bedside care is critical.

The multidisciplinary team is delivering a transformative fibre-based point-of-care sensing device, which will lead to significant healthcare improvement through rapid point-of-care diagnosis, patient stratification and personalised drug therapy.  In particular this will allow identification of infection in the distal lung, leading to more informed and appropriate use of antibiotics.

First in man studies

As of January 2017, the team have already demonstrated that the use of a fluorescence-based microendoscopy system is capable of simultaneously detecting several different pathogens in human ex vivo lung tissue. Preparations are now underway to perform the first in vivo human clinical studies, marking a huge milestone in the project timeline.