A nanoengineered platform for rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing

Antibiotics susceptibility testing is often performed to determine the antibiotic resistance of pathogenic agents in clinical samples, such as urine or wound specimens. Rapid determination of antibiotics susceptibility is crucial towards judicious management of infectious diseases, especially in emergency situations and high-risk areas such as hospitals, rural clinics, and temporary clinics established in response to disasters. Nevertheless, standard procedures for antibiotics susceptibility testing are laborintensive, time consuming, and require a centralized laboratory. Therefore, a point-of-care device for rapid antibiotics susceptibility testing is highly desirable. It will lead to evidence-based, rather than empiric, management of infectious diseases to allow more judicious use of antibiotics, which in turn will reduce the emergence of multi-drug resistant pathogens or “superbugs”. Here, we present the development of a nanoengineered platform for rapid antibiotics susceptibility and show that the result can be obtained in 2 to 3 hours, compared to 24–48 hours in standard procedures.