Listen now | For a patient with sepsis (an infection in the blood), the chance of survival decreases by 7-10% every hour. It’s important to quickly identify what bacteria are present and which antibiotics might be effective. Typically, there are very few bacteria in the blood. Culturing bacteria from a sample can take 12-24 hours and then one needs to test for drug susceptibility. Speeding up this process would save a lot of lives.