BaseTrack

The Problem

Blood poisoning demands faster answers

Bloodstream infection kills. The bottleneck is time.

🩸 Bacteraemia and Sepsis

When bacteria enter the bloodstream (bacteremia), it can rapidly trigger a life-threatening immune response known as sepsis. Every hour without the right antibiotic increases the risk of organ failure and death.

⏳ The diagnostic bottleneck

Traditional lab methods grow bacteria in a bottle then run culture-based tests. Identifying the organism and its drug resistance typically takes 36–72 hours.

💊 Antibiotic resistance

Broad-spectrum antibiotics are prescribed when a patient presents with bacteraemia. Resistance genes can render this ineffective; sensitive organisms can make it an overreaction. In both cases BaseTrack finds the answer sooner and improves patient care.

🧪 Fixed-panel PCR limits

Rapid PCR can only detect a pre-set list of targets — it cannot identify novel resistance mechanisms or organisms outside its fixed panel. PCR platforms also carry significantly higher capital and running costs than BaseTrack.

How It Works

The BaseTrack pipeline

From positive blood culture to report in 4–10 hours.

Step 1 Blood culture turns positive

A laboratory incubator detects bacterial growth in the patient's blood culture bottle — the starting signal for the BaseTrack workflow.

Step 2 DNA extraction

The sample is processed using bead-beating and a specialist extraction kit to isolate pure DNA for sequencing.

Step 3 Nanopore sequencing

DNA is loaded onto an Oxford Nanopore MinION — a palm-sized device that reads DNA in real time, streaming data to the cloud.

Step 4 BaseTrack cloud analysis

Algorithms identify the organism and scan for over 2,500 resistance genes across the entire genome.

Step 5 Clinical report

A structured report names the pathogen and flags resistance markers — days before conventional culture results.

Comparison

Standard culture vs BaseTrack WGS

Standard Culture

BaseTrack WGS

Time to result

36–72 hours

4–10 hours

Target coverage

Selected antibiotic panels

Whole genome — unlimited targets

Resistance detection

Phenotypic resistance

Genotypic AMR profile

Gene coverage

No genomic data

>2,500 resistance genes

Stewardship

Established standard

Designed for ASP integration

Polymicrobial BSI

Misses 30% of minority organisms

Detects all co-infecting species (Liu et al. 2024)

Why It Matters

The clinical

🩸 Sepsis: the leading preventable killer

Sepsis is the leading cause of death from acute in-hospital complications. The window to intervene opens the moment the blood culture turns positive.

⏱ Every hour reduces the odds

In septic shock, each hour without appropriate antibiotic therapy is associated with a ~7.6% decrease in survival (Kumar et al., 2006).

🧬 Resistance demands precision

Resistant organisms — CRE, MRSA, VRE — require specific targeted therapy that broad-spectrum empirical cover cannot reliably provide.

🏛️ Aligned with national AMR strategy

Aligns with EU and NHS AMR strategy priorities to improve stewardship, preserve existing antibiotics, and accelerate precision infection management.

The economic

💷 Sepsis carries catastrophic cost

At a 1,000-bed teaching hospital, BaseTrack generates a modelled net annual saving of €2.4 million — a gross saving of €2.7 million offset by €287,000 in platform and reagent costs. The breakeven point is 339 bacteraemia cases — just 11% of the 3,162 annual true bacteraemias.

💊 The return on investment is 8.3×

For every €1 spent on BaseTrack, the model returns €8.33 in savings — driven by a 1.7-day mean LOS reduction (Timbrook et al. 2017) and de-escalation from carbapenems and glycopeptides to targeted therapy across ~1,423 actionable cases per year.

🌍 AMR will cost the world $100 trillion

The O'Neill Review (2016) projected that antimicrobial resistance, unchecked, will kill 10 million people annually and cost the global economy $100 trillion by 2050. Every unnecessary broad-spectrum prescription accelerates that trajectory.

📊 Stewardship programmes save money

Well-implemented antimicrobial stewardship programmes consistently deliver cost savings of £100,000–£500,000 per year in large teaching hospitals. BaseTrack provides the genotypic data that allows for prompt stewardship decisions.

How the figures are derived

Hospital baseline — 1,000-bed teaching hospital

Blood cultures drawn per year 34,000 34 sets/bed × 1,000 beds. European BCUR range: 103–188/1,000 pt-days (Willems et al. 2022)

Culture positivity rate 11.5% Tertiary referral centre range. HSE/RCPI Irish Guideline 2021; NICE NG51

True bacteraemia rate (excl. contaminants) 9.3% 11.5% positivity − 2.2% contamination. Pien et al. 2010 (PMID: 20800151)

True bacteraemias per year 3,162

Actionable cases

AMR-actionable fraction 45% Proportion where rapid WGS AMR profile materially changes management. Base case; range 30–60% by site

Actionable cases per year 1,423

Saving per episode

LOS reduction 1.7 days × €1,000 = €1,700 Timbrook et al. 2016 (PMID: 27678085); conservative vs WMD −2.48 days for mPCR. HSE blended bed cost €878 (2019), inflated to €1,000

Antibiotic de-escalation saving €180 Differential: meropenem/vancomycin → narrow-spectrum, 5–7 days. MacVane & Nolte 2016 (PMID: 27487951)

Total saving per actionable episode €1,880

Annual cost of BaseTrack

Annual subscription €5,000

Per-test charge (processing + reagents) €72 × 3,910 tests

Total annual BaseTrack cost €287,000

Headline outputs

Net annual saving €2.4M 1,423 cases × €1,880 − €287K BaseTrack cost

Return on investment 8.3× Net saving ÷ annual BaseTrack cost

Breakeven 339 cases Just 11% of annual true bacteraemia caseload

Deaths prevented per year 95–253 22% baseline BSI mortality (Goto & Al-Hasan 2013); 3–8pp absolute reduction with active ASP (Timbrook et al. 2016)

Meet the Founders

BaseTrack Limited

William Hendy Chief Executive Officer

William Hendy is an HCPC-registered Biomedical Scientist with 15 years' experience in clinical microbiology across Ireland and the United Kingdom. His career spans the full spectrum of diagnostic settings — from large centralised hub laboratories processing thousands of samples daily to small, remote facilities operating with minimal infrastructure — encompassing NHS, HSE, and private diagnostic environments, as well as public health work. William has held senior and technical lead roles giving him both frontline bench experience and operational responsibility that comes with overseeing diagnostic quality and decision-making. That breadth gives him an unusually complete picture of how diagnostic microbiology functions across different resource and governance contexts. As CEO and co-founder of BaseTrack, he leads on scientific design specification, regulatory strategy, clinical validation design, and commercial strategy.

Alastair Mackie Chief Product Officer

Alastair Mackie is a software engineer with over a decade of experience building cloud-native, data-intensive platforms across healthcare, logistics, and e-commerce. He specialises in Node.js microservice architecture, AWS infrastructure, and NoSQL data systems, with deep experience integrating third-party APIs and shipping production software at scale. His background spans distributed systems design, DevOps, and leading small engineering teams to deliver complex technical products. Prior to his engineering career, Alastair worked in corporate and investment banking at a global financial institution and in M&A strategy, bringing a commercially grounded perspective to technical decision-making — an asset when navigating the regulatory, procurement, and go-to-market realities of a MedTech product like BaseTrack.