Narodowy Instytut Leków

Narodowy Instytut Leków (National Medicines Institute, NMI) is a non-profit public research and development entity involved in a broad range of scientific activities in the general interest of protecting and improving healthcare in Poland.

The staphylococcal group from the Department of Epidemiology and Clinical Microbiology is a leading group in the field of Staphylococcus aureus molecular epidemiology in Poland collaborating with clinical microbiology laboratories throughout the country. It participates in countrywide surveys of S. aureus in hospital and community settings and performs surveillance of antimicrobial resistance of this pathogen, including susceptibility testing and analysis of resistance determinants and their dissemination. The Department of Epidemiology and Clinical Microbiology owns a huge collection of bacterial strains (app. 100,000) isolated from a great variety of infections, both invasive and organ related, from carriage state, animals and environment. A high percentage of these strains are multidrug-resistant, with different levels and mechanisms of resistance.

The NMI staphylococcal group members have extensive experience in susceptibility testing, typing techniques, and detection of resistance and virulence determinants, relevant to the molecular epidemiology of S. aureus. In the LeadtoTreat project the group will be responsible for providing a panel of diverse clinical methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolates characterized at phenotypic and molecular levels necessary for the project's research. The group will select antibiotics for the drug synergy screening and will be involved in the in vitro evaluation of project's nano-formulations against MRSA isolates.