664 - LiaX as a Surrogate Marker of Daptomycin Susceptibility in Multidrug-Resistant Enterococcus faecium Recovered from Cancer Patients

Background: Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VREfm) are leading causes of bloodstream infections (BSI) in patients (pts) with hematological malignancies (HM). Daptomycin (DAP) is commonly used to treat VRE BSI, but DAP non-susceptibility (DAP-NS) in pts with HM is increasing. Current methods to determine DAP minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) have poor reproducibility. DAP triggers the LiaFSR cell membrane stress response pathway, resulting in the extracellular release of the protein LiaX, a novel protein that functions as a regulator of the membrane response. We postulated that detection of extracellular LiaX correlates with DAP-NS in clinical strains of VREfm.

Methods: We used 6 well-characterized VREfm BSI isolates (2 DAP-S, 4 DAP-NS) as reference strains to optimize a whole-cell indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) method for LiaX detection. We assessed limit of detection and reproducibility of the ELISA LiaX method. We then assessed 54 clinical VREfm BSI isolates from pts with cancer for validation. We determined DAP MICs by broth microdilution (BMD). We collected clinical and microbiological details by chart review

Results: The 6 reference strains showed high reproducibility with low coefficient of variation. All DAP-NS reference strains had increased detection of LiaX (p< 0.0001) compared to DAP-S reference strains. Of the 54 isolates from pts, most pts (83.3%) had HM. The source of 62.9% of VRE BSIs was determined to be gastrointestinal. Six of the 54 isolates were DAP-NS by BMD MIC. The LiaX test and MIC had categorical agreement on 56% of isolates. Of the isolates with disagreement, 19 isolates were susceptible by MIC (median 2 μg/ml) but non-susceptible by LiaX ELISA, and 5 isolates were non-susceptible by MIC (6, 8, 8, 8, and 16 μg/ml, respectively) but susceptible by LiaX ELISA.Whole-cell indirect LiaX ELISA A405nm of Efm reference strains shows ability to differentiate DAP susceptible MICs from DAP resistant MICs. DAP susceptible (MIC=2 μg/ml) Efm strains are shown in green and DAP resistant (MIC≥8 μg/ml) strains in red. DAP-S reference strains have no LiaFSR mutations. The dotted line indicates an example cutoff for DAP-S/R in this assay. *p<0.05, **p<0.0001 by unpaired t-test. Coefficieint of variance for each reference is <15%.


Conclusion: Detection of extracellular LiaX has important discrepancies with DAP MIC. Interestingly, LiaX may be a surrogate marker to detect strains with heightened DAP-mediated cell membrane response and potentially identify strains predisposed to DAP therapy failure. Further characterization of the discrepant isolates by genomic analyses and time-kill assays are warranted to fully validate the performance of LiaX ELISA.