Bacterial infections that develop resistance to drugs affect at least 2.8 million Americans each year. Gram-negative rod (GNR) infections especially have high and emerging resistance rates and pose a large threat, considering the lack of new antimicrobial medicine. GNR pathogens can cause a wide variety of infections, such as urinary tract infections, pneumonia, or intraabdominal infections, in community and health care settings. 

Michihiko Goto, MD, MSCI, assistant professor in Infectious Diseases, has been focused on antimicrobial stewardship for some time, even launching a VA Patient Safety Center of Inquiry to tackle the problem on a variety of fronts a couple years ago.

More recently, Goto has received a five-year, $731,346 K08 grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), an affiliate of the National Institutes of Health, for a project titled “Internal Medicine Improving Empiric Antimicrobial Therapy for Gram-Negative Infections through a Personalized Smart Antibiogram.” Goto’s project will examine the current and potential use of antibiograms as a tool for antimicrobial stewardship. This study will aid in the creation of a more adaptive “smart antibiogram,” which applies health informatics, data science, and prediction-modeling to create a personalized decision-support tool and thus improve the use of antibiotics for GNR infections.

“To combat the emerging problem of antimicrobial resistance among GNR pathogens, more progress is needed to improve antimicrobial resistance,” Goto said.