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Home › Products & Services › Infectious Diseases › Laboratories and Reference Facilities › Antibiotic Resistance Monitoring & Reference Laboratory (ARMRL) ›Research & Development
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Research & Development

ARMRL's research activities centre on (i) the biochemistry, genetics and molecular epidemiology of key antibiotic resistances, and (ii) evaluation of the in-vitro activities of new antibiotics.

Our development programme aims to improve our reference services by application of molecular technologies for rapid detection of key resistances.

Mechanisms of antibiotic resistance

We concentrate our efforts on investigating resistance to 'antibiotics of last resort' i.e. to drugs that usually remain active against bacteria resistant to other agents.

For gram-positive bacteria, these include the glycopeptides (vancomycin and teicoplanin), oxazolidinones (linezolid), streptogramin combinations (quinupristin/dalfopristin), lipopeptides (daptomycin) and glycylcycline (tigecycline).

For gram-negative bacteria, they are the carbapenems, imipenem, meropenem, and ertapenem, and the glycylcycline, tigecycline.

Resistance to most of these drugs is rare, but disturbing. The exception is glycopeptide resistance.

Current Interests

Currently, ARMRL's research interests are focused on :

  • mechanisms of non-carbapenemase-mediated resistance to carbapenems in Enterobacteriaceae, particularly in Klebsiella spp. and Enterobacter spp.
  • mechanisms of resistance or reduced susceptibility to tigecycline in Enterobacteriaceae and Acinetobacter spp.
  • the diversity of plasmids mediating CTX-M-type ESBLs in Enterobacteriaceae, and comparison with those prevalent in E. coli.
  • outcomes analyses for treatment of infections caused by carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, with particular reference to the efficacy of tigecycline and colistin vs. "UK OXA-23 clone 1".
  • the application of proteomics techniques to investigate novel and complex resistance phenotypes.
  • evaluation of micro-arrays for defining resistance genotypes.

Evaluation of new antibacterials

Another key area of research is in-vitro assessment of new antibiotics against multi-resistant bacteria. ARMRL is ideally placed for this work. We receive resistant bacteria from many hospitals and can assemble nationally-representative collections of multi-resistant bacteria. This work is collaborative with the pharmaceutical companies.

In addition we use our strain collections to test resistance detection systems which may prove useful for clinical microbiology laboratories in the future.