On-Chip Raman Spectroscopy for Rapid Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing from Blood Cultures

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Diagnostics
• Spectroscopy
• Microbiology

Background:

• Bloodstream infections cause significant morbidity and mortality.
• Current antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) methods are often time-consuming or lack phenotypic relevance.
• Rapid diagnostics are crucial for effective treatment of bloodstream infections.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce the RamanBioAssay (RBA) platform for rapid phenotypic AST and bacterial identification.
• To evaluate the performance of the RBA platform in terms of speed and accuracy.
• To compare RBA results with conventional AST methods.

Main Methods:

• Integration of dielectrophoretic on-chip bacterial enrichment with label-free Raman spectroscopy.
• Phenotypic AST and bacterial identification performed on positive blood cultures.
• Validation using quality control strains and clinical blood culture samples.

Main Results:

• RBA platform provided AST results within 3.5 hours, significantly faster than standard methods.
• High concordance rates observed with conventional AST for E. coli and S. aureus.
• Accurate bacterial identification (family level) achieved with 97.2% accuracy.

Conclusions:

• The RBA platform is a promising tool for rapid phenotypic AST and bacterial identification.
• It offers clinically actionable results significantly faster than current diagnostic approaches.
• RBA has the potential to improve patient outcomes for bloodstream infections.