Vancomycin is the antibiotic doctors reach for when almost nothing else will work. It’s used in hospitals for serious drug-resistant infections, or for when an infection is spreading through the patient’s bloodstream, but it’s also notoriously tricky to dose: too little and it won’t knock out the infection, too much and the patient risks kidney damage or even death. Up to 40% of patients receiving vancomycin develop an acute kidney injury.

Right now, dosage levels are monitored by repeated blood tests, an invasive and time-consuming process that can’t always give clinicians the data they need in time. Hoping to solve this issue, UNSW and international researchers working alongside Australian diagnostics company Nutromics developed a minimally invasive patch that tracks the antibiotic in patients every five minutes.

The team has published the results of a clinical trial in Nature Biotechnology, and say its success demonstrates that the major scientific and safety challenges have been solved.