Guy Hembury

Director @Astratus Limited

Reading, GB

The University of Reading’s director on the company board of Astratus Limited, with responsibility for supporting the company’s leadership team in its development, and managing the University’s interests.Astratus is a recent University of Reading spin out company modernising traditional microbiology laboratory methods.When managing urinary tract infection (UTI), the Astratus technology enables the right treatment to be prescribed to the right patient playing a vital role in antimicrobial stewardship and helping tackle antimicrobial resistance. The Astratus rapid, accurate, high throughput laboratory platform significantly reduces time to result and is less labour intensive.Astratus is a One Health company serving human, veterinary and research markets offering a novel microcapillary “dip and test” cassette and instrument reader platform for antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) either direct from urine or from bacterial isolates.The rapid AST platform provides digital AST results direct from urine in <6 hours, instead of several days, performs identically to clinical reference standard methodology and can be easily scaled to increase throughput.As well as providing a platform for rapid AST, the technology could be used by researchers and companies developing new antimicrobials, investigating biofilms or novel therapies including phage therapies.

The University of Sheffield

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

The University of Sheffield

B.Sc. (Hons)