Rapid antimicrobial prescriptions are required when viable bacteria are in the blood or bacteremia, which can result in sepsis and bloodstream infection (BSI). Due to the lengthy nature of traditional antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST), clinicians must rely on experience. In comparison to conventional approaches that take two days, researchers have created a BSI-AST chip for quick AST from positive blood cultures, cutting the time from bacteria extraction to results to less than 3.5 hours. In this work, the scientists created a BSI-AST chip that can directly extract bacteria from PBCs in 10 minutes; fast AST findings take an extra three hours to produce.
With less than 3.5 hours of results, the BSI-AST chip proved effective in AST testing on fake PBCs, including E. coli. Its 93.3% agreement with conventional clinical procedures demonstrated its promise in clinical diagnosis. There were difficulties because intricate sample preparation procedures were absent on-chip in previous microfluidic systems. Because it could operate straight from PBCs without requiring a subculture, the BSI-AST chip was hailed as a “significant advancement.”
By adding a separator gel to the microfluidic chip for the first time, the researchers could extract and enrich bacteria from PBCs quickly. Technology for centrifugal microfluidic enrichment was also essential to the procedure. Additionally, clinicians are assisted in optimizing antibiotic therapy for patients with bone splinter infections by the chip’s multiplexed analysis capabilities through antibiotic drying and array parallelization.
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