Microfluidic Systems for Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing

Human health is threatened by the spread of antimicrobial resistance and resulting infections. One reason for the resistance spread is the treatment with inappropriate and ineffective antibiotics because standard antimicrobial susceptibility testing methods are time-consuming and laborious. To reduce the antimicrobial susceptibility detection time, minimize treatments with empirical broad-spectrum antibiotics, and thereby combat the further spread of antimicrobial resistance, faster and point-of-care methods are needed. This requires many different research approaches. Microfluidic systems for antimicrobial susceptibility testing offer the possibility to reduce the detection time, as small sample and reagent volumes can be used and the detection of single cells is possible. In some cases, the aim is to use human samples without pretreatment or pre-cultivation. This chapter first provides an overview of conventional detection methods. It then presents the potential of and various current approaches in microfluidics. The focus is on microfluidic methods for phenotypic antimicrobial susceptibility testing.