Sapna K Deo
University of Miami, FL·Biochemistry
Urinary tract infections affect roughly 150 million people a year worldwide, and the standard way to confirm one is slow. Urine analysis plus a urine culture requires a clinical lab and takes one to three days.
- Fields
Biochemistry
Biomedical Engineering
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
urinary tract infection
bioluminescence
Photobacterium
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2030
What they work on
- Develop a bioluminescence-based test using light-emitting Photobacterium cells to quantify urinary tract infection-causing bacteria in urine, read on both a microtiter plate reader and a handheld luminometer.
- Build a companion bioluminescent whole-cell test that screens urine from patients already diagnosed with a urinary tract infection for antimicrobial-resistant bacteria to guide antibiotic selection.
- Formulate the bioluminescent sensing cells in freeze-dried, lyophilized form so the tests are simple, rapid and inexpensive without requiring culture, amplification or molecular probes.
- Carry out pilot studies with clinical urine samples to evaluate how accurately both tests measure bacterial load and detect antibiotic resistance in patients.
More about the research
Quick bedside options, such as dipsticks that detect leukocyte esterase or nitrite, only measure infection indirectly, miss cases, and say nothing about how many bacteria are present. That number matters: the clinical threshold for a urinary tract infection is about 100,000 colony-forming units per milliliter of urine, and whether a patient below that threshold should receive antibiotics depends on their infection history and other conditions. Overuse of antibiotics has in turn driven antimicrobial resistance among these infections, so a second question has become just as urgent as the first: are the bacteria in this sample resistant? This project proposes two rapid tests that address both questions at once.
Why it matters
Patients with suspected urinary tract infections currently wait one to three days for a culture result, and antibiotics are often started without knowing the bacterial load or whether the organism is resistant. A rapid, low-cost test that reports both could support more accurate diagnosis, better-targeted antibiotic choices and follow-up, and may help curb the antibiotic overuse that fuels resistance.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jennie Kwon
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research
Identify clinical risk factors for community-associated antibiotic-resistant infections, using a database of patients with urinary tract and bloodstream infections from community and healthcare settings.
Eva Raphael
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Identify demographic and neighborhood-level risk factors for community-onset UTIs caused by ESBL-producing E. coli in women, using causal inference methods, compared with other resistant and with antibiotic-susceptible UTIs.
Mohammad Al-bataineh
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Microbiology & Immunology
Characterize how uropathogenic E. coli binds MUC1, a sugar-coated protein on urinary tract cells. Use purified MUC1 and cells with different MUC1 levels and sugar patterns to test whether it acts as a docking receptor or a decoy.
The school
University of Miami: 30 labs on PI Pages, $559M a year on research, 297 research doctorates a year.
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