News

The Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) is pleased to welcome Zahra Shajani-Yi, PhD, DABCC, FADLM to the CLSI Board of Directors.

The Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 CLSI Excellence Awards.

The Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) announced today the formation of a new Laboratory-Developed Test (LDT) Final Rule Advisory Group. The group, comprising 15 respected subject matter experts in laboratory medicine and regulatory policy, is scheduled to convene for the first time in mid-December 2024

CLSI and bioMérieux launch a Global Symposium in Tokyo to advance antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST).

The Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2024 Excellence Awards. The Excellence Awards recognize the achievements of CLSI volunteers and organizational members who are committed to CLSI’s mission and have helped improve the quality of medical care worldwide. Recipients are recognized for dedicating significant time and effort to the development, implementation, and promotion of CLSI standards.

In 1972, CLSI, formerly known as the National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards (NCCLS), published “Table 1” in one of the earliest NCCLS AST documents. Table 1 was intended to help clinical laboratories decide which antimicrobial agents to test and report on specific bacteria. New drugs and new comments were added to the Tables 1 over the ensuing decades, but the format for these tables did not change.

Many laboratorians are familiar with sulbactam, a β-lactamase inhibitor that is commercially combined with ampicillin, which was introduced in the US in 1986 to make ampicillin-sulbactam (“Unasyn”). Like many older β-lactamase inhibitors, sulbactam is itself a β-lactam, but has poor antimicrobial activity against most bacteria.

A 59-year-old woman with metastatic breast cancer was admitted to a hospital for fever and suspected sepsis 12 days after chemotherapy-induced neutropenia (<1,000 neutrophils/μL in peripheral blood; normal range 2500-7000 neutrophils/μL). The patient was started empirically on cefepime, vancomycin, and anidulafungin. Two sets of blood cultures grew Candida tropicalis on day 3 post admission. Since this isolate was recovered from the blood, both species-level identification and susceptibility testing were performed. At the time of blood culture positivity, the patient did not report any visual symptoms, and dilated fundoscopy of the eyes on day 4 did not reveal any signs of ocular involvement.

Between 2018-2021, the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) reported that 0.4% (n=1,951) of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) in the United States were caused by Acinetobacter spp. Of these, 28-45% were not susceptible to carbapenem antibiotics (ie, intermediate or resistant).1 CDC’s 2019 Antibiotic Resistance Threats Report estimated that there were 8,500 carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter cases in hospitalized patients in 2017.2 Consistently, the A. calcoaceticus-A. baumannii complex (A. baumannii) is the largest cause of clinical Acinetobacter spp. infections and is most often recovered from respiratory specimens.

The Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) announced today the implementation of new Country-Based Pricing for countries that meet economic criteria set forth by the World Bank. Effective immediately, this pricing structure will enable laboratories and clinicians around the world, regardless of resources, to more feasibly access CLSI’s robust library of standards documents, training and support materials, and membership.