About the Antimicrobial Resistance Isolate Bank

Located at and managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in collaboration with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Antimicrobial Resistance Isolate Bank (AR Isolate Bank) helps laboratory experts find the latest and highest-quality antimicrobial-resistant isolates. Registered customers can order “isolates for action” that include a subset of known microbial threats collected from CDC’s ongoing surveillance, outbreak activities and external collaborators. CDC then combines these samples into panels for testing.

Because antimicrobial resistance (AR) occurs as part of a natural evolution process, it can be slowed, but not stopped. Infection prevention strategies, new diagnostic tests and antibiotic or antifungal drugs can support earlier diagnoses and more effective treatment options that can slow AR and protect people.

The AR Isolate Bank aids in the fight against antimicrobial resistance through these groups:

• Microbiologists and lab directors use AR Isolate Bank samples to validate new lab tests, which can help improve patient care.
• Drug and diagnostic manufacturers use AR Isolate Bank samples to challenge new products they have created like, diagnostic assays and new antibiotics, and to accelerate research and development.
• Researchers use AR Isolate Bank samples to build solutions against the latest AR threats.

Since its launch in July 2015, the AR Isolate Bank has provided more than 10,000 isolate panels to more than 2,000 recognized institutions.

Each order includes:

• Information about isolate susceptibility and/or resistance profile(s).
• Known resistance biomarkers, source, collection year (if available).
• Publicly available Whole Genome Sequence data posted on the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).

Learn more about CDC’s work to combat antibiotic resistance.

Other Resources

The CDC and FDA AR Isolate Bank is a unique resource because it delivers curated isolate panels from CDC’s vast collection of antimicrobial-resistant organisms. Individual isolates and isolate sets are also available from other sources:

• The Active Bacterial Core surveillance (ABCs) Isolate Bank. An extensive collection of isolates for ABCs pathogens: group A Streptococcus, group B Streptococcus, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Neisseria meningitidis, and Haemophilus influenzae. ABCs is a core program within CDC’s Emerging Infections Program (EIP) network. EIP is a collaboration between CDC, state health departments and academic institutions. ABCs is an active laboratory- and population-based surveillance system for invasive bacterial pathogens of public health importance.
• The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR)        is a part of the U.S. Military Health System and maintains a collection of well-characterized antimicrobial-resistant isolates gathered from participating military hospitals through Multidrug-Resistant Organism Repository and Surveillance Network (health.mil)      .
• The Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group (ARLG) maintains a Virtual Biorepository       that provides investigators with access to clinically well-characterized Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria.
• The Biodefense and Emerging Infections Research Resources Repository (BEI Resources)      , established by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), provides tools and information for studying Category A, B and C priority pathogens, emerging infectious disease agents, non-pathogenic microbes and other relevant microbiological materials to the research community.
• The European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (EUCAST) in collaboration with the Culture Collection of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and EUCAST National Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing Committees, have panels of organisms with phenotypically well characterized levels of suspectibility available      .
• The American Type Culture Collection (ATCC)       provides an expanding collection of clinically relevant antimicrobial-resistant bacterial and fungal strains with extensive levels of source metadata and genotypic and phenotypic characterization.
• The National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC)       provides bacterial strains that represent many species from disease conditions and widespread geographical locations, some containing specific plasmids.