Parallel Nanoliter Arrays Based Microfluidic Device for Quick Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing

Antimicrobial resistant bacteria is emerging as a great global threat. The inefficacy of antibiotics to control the growth of bacteria makes the bacterial infection difficult to cure. Rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) of bacteria can be helpful in curbing the infection by identifying suitable antibiotics. The methods employed for performing AST in clinical settings relies on the growth of bacteria which is very time-consuming. Therefore, there is a pressing need for performing rapid AST. This study therefore presents an array-based multiplexed microfluidic platform to perform quick AST using multiple concentrations or types of antibiotics, simultaneously on a chip. The device involved only one loading process to generate all the microarrays to perform AST with four different concentrations of antibiotics, which makes the device parallelized and efficient. In this work, AST using four different concentrations of ampicillin with bacteria (E. coli ATCC 25922) has been demonstrated on one chip. Since all the antibiotics are on a single device, they are subjected to exactly the same condition which makes them suitable for comparison. Moreover, a suitable loading process was employed which ensured simultaneous filling and hence equal distribution of bacteria in all microarrays to perform the AST. With this approach, fast AST could be realized without human intervention.