Bacterial Respiratory Infections clinical trials

Microdosing of BAC ONE to the Distal Lung

Critically ill patients are often ventilated in dedicated critical care units to provide respiratory support. Despite best practice patients can often develop a condition called adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which is characterised by deterioration in their respiratory function, and changes on chest x-ray. The correct management for ARDS is identifying the underlying condition causing the deterioration and identifying appropriate targeted therapy. One such cause is pneumonia, caused by a bacterial infection in the lungs of a ventilated patient. The patients may have been ventilated due to pneumonia but they may also develop pneumonia whilst ventilated. Ventilator associated pneumonia (VAP) has significant mortality. Despite all the clinical and laboratory data at the investigators' disposal there remains great difficulty in the accurate diagnosis of pneumonia and therefore treatment is often given empirically. Therefore, there is an urgent clinical need for accurate methods to diagnose the presence of bacteria deep in the lung in ventilated critically ill patients. As such, the investigating team have developed and synthesised an imaging agent called BAC ONE. BAC ONE will be instilled directly into the lungs of 12 patients (with and without lung infection) to assess whether it can label bacteria in the human lung.