Onur Parlak

One-fifth of Sweden’s population is affected by slow-healing wounds, and the number is rapidly growing. In Sweden, 2.5 billion SEK is spent on treating chronic wounds annually. Notably, the 5-year mortality rate for patients who suffer from chronic wounds is even higher than prostate and breast cancer. However, effective and targeted wound treatment using advanced tools and devices is still lacking due to a poor understanding of the pathogenic mechanisms and inadequate real-time information on a wound. Therefore, we believe a better understanding of the wound provided by in situ physiological surveillance on bacterial load can help for timely diagnosis and identify novel therapeutic targets. Existing methods for bacterial sensing require an extensive procedure and, more importantly, cannot provide real-time information. These tests usually take long hours, resulting in suboptimal antibiotic therapy that negatively affects commensal microflora and increases antimicrobial resistance. Here, we propose to design a wearable epidermal patch for multiplexed sensing of whole bacterial cells and bacterial biomarkers for the fast and early diagnosis of bacterial infection in a human skin wound. This project aims to combine cutting-edge interdisciplinary methodologies with our unique access to patient materials, which creates an unprecedented opportunity to address fundamental questions in infection monitoring in human wounds.