The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) recommends monitoring hypervirulent K. pneumoniae strains (hvKp)

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) has been monitoring hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae for some time. A sharp increase in both the number of cases and resistance led to rapid risk assessments in 2021 and 2024 that broke this down in more detail. The number of countries submitting data rose from 4 to 10 and the number of strains to be examined increased from 12 to 143 isolates. Also striking was the sharp increase in carbapenem resistance (OXA-48, OXA-181, KPC-2, NDM-1 and VIM-1) of the already very virulent strains. "Classic" Klebsiella pneumoniae are the cause of infections in vulnerable groups of people or in hospitals. Hypervirulent K. pneumoniae (hvKp), on the other hand, can lead to dangerous infections such as liver abscesses, community-acquired pneumonia and community-acquired meningitis in healthy people without previous illnesses and also in younger people. In comparison to "classic" Klebsiella, hypervirulent Klebsiella can also form foci of infection in several places in the organism at the same time, i.e. behave "metastatically". The mortality rate also appears to be higher than with an infection with "classic" K. pneumoniae. If antibiotic resistance and virulence coincide in hvKp strains, there is a risk of untreatable infections in previously healthy people. Effective surveillance of potentially hypervirulent K. pneumoniae strains is crucial to detect spread and possible outbreaks and thus minimize the risks to public health.

The national institutes have also been involved in monitoring hvKp in order to assess the spread and the risk to public health and, if necessary, to initiate the necessary measures. All institutions involved, national and international, believe that it is important to quickly identify hvKp and its carbapem resistance in order to contain its spread. To do this, simple and rapid diagnostics are needed that can also be easily implemented in routine laboratories.

The current state of the art for detecting hv-K. pneumoniae is whole genome sequencing (WGS) with subsequent classification of the virulence score using "kleborates", but this is time-consuming, expensive and computationally intensive. Due to the impending spread of the pathogen, especially in healthcare facilities, molecular biological methods such as PCR and LAMP are gaining importance due to their easy availability and shorter runtime and are beginning to establish themselves in the diagnosis of hv-K. pneumoniae.

You can find out how helpful our eazyplex^® hv-K. pneumoniae kit is in routine use in the publication by Jürgen Rödel et al. (2023):

“The eazyplex® hvKp, currently only available as a Research Use Only assay, may be a useful tool for the rapid identification of hvKp without significant additional workload when combined with the eazyplex^® Superbug CRE assay for the detection of carbapenemases.”

With the eazyplex^® hv-K. pneumoniae kit you can not only detect important virulence factors, but with our eazyplex^® SuperBug kits you can also detect all important carbapenem resistances from the same sample in just a few minutes in order to be able to initiate an adapted and effective patient management.