Key points
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have one of the largest collections of isolates gathered from national reference labs and tracking activities taken from specimens in healthcare, food, and community settings.
- By safely providing isolates to approved institutions at no cost, the CDC and FDA Antimicrobial Resistance Isolate Bank (AR Isolate Bank) improves patient care and supports solutions against drug-resistant threats.
Advancing the fight against antimicrobial resistance
As of December 1, 2025, the AR Isolate Bank shipped more than 500,000 isolates (pure samples of a germ), from 13,500 isolate panels. The AR Isolate Bank helps:
- Strengthen diagnostics by supporting laboratories in validating tests.
- Inform research to:
- Develop drugs like antibiotics and antifungals.
- Develop diagnostic devices and tests.
- Support regulatory requests or applications to FDA.
- Perform testing to ensure drug effectiveness.
- Study mechanisms of resistance (the ability of germs to adapt and evolve).
- Detect new and unusual resistance threats to help public health and healthcare facilities rapidly implement recommended infection prevention and control measures.
Why the AR Isolate Bank is unique
CDC and the FDA have one of the largest collections of isolates gathered from national reference labs and tracking activities, taken from specimens in healthcare, food and community settings. Isolates are only provided to approved institutions, with those institutions only paying for shipping.
Benefits of the using the AR Isolate Bank
- Approved institutions receive isolates at no cost. They only pay for shipping.
- Isolates are delivered in panels, not piecemeal.
- Researchers obtain the specific samples they need quickly and easily.
- Reduces obstacles that may keep companies or researchers from engaging in finding solutions to AR threats.
- Isolates are delivered in panels and come with publicly available data (antimicrobial susceptibility profile and resistance mechanisms).
- Offers a convenient web ordering system that increases efficiency.
- Confirmatory testing is performed periodically to ensure samples maintain their resistance mechanisms over time.
- Panels are refreshed as needed to include susceptibility data for newly approved antibiotics, relevant species or mechanisms, and updated whole genome sequence analyses.
The isolates helped us challenge out diagnostic tests to ensure they can detect a variety of resistance targets.
- Biotechnology company
Resources
Ordering isolates from the AR Isolate Bank
CDC and FDA’s AR Isolate Bank is a biorepository of bacterial and fungal isolates. It provides curat...
Related web pages
- CDC provides downloadable minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) distributions of bacterial and Candida bloodstream isolates. These isolates are tested in compliance with standards established by the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI).
- Working together, CLSI with CDC, Association of Public Health Laboratories, American Society for Microbiology, and College of American Pathologists developed a toolkit to assist clinical laboratories in updating MIC breakpoints. The toolkit is designed to guide performance of a verification study required to update breakpoints. Additional resources can be found within the toolkit that help explain the need for the updates, regulatory requirements and detailed instructions for providing AST breakpoint verification.
- You can also find individual isolates and isolate sets from additional sources.
Fact sheets
The AR Isolate Bank has one of the largest collections of isolates gathered from national reference...
Five key things for you to know about the Antimicrobial Resistance Isolate Bank.