Point-of-care platform for rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing

With global antimicrobial resistance becoming increasingly detrimental to society, improving current clinical antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) is crucial to allow physicians to initiate appropriate antibiotic treatment as early as possible, reducing not only mortality rates but also the emergence of resistant pathogens. We tackle one of the bottlenecks of clinical antibiotic susceptibility testing by designing silicon microstructured arrays to provide a preferable solid-liquid interface for bacterial networking and a simultaneous transducing element that monitors responses of bacteria when exposed to antibiotics in real time. We harness the intrinsic ability of micro-architectures to relay optical phase-shift reflectometric interference spectroscopic measurements, termed as PRISM, and employ it as a platform for culture-free, label-free tracking of bacterial accumulation, proliferation, and death. Using PRISM we additionally observe adhesion patterns of several clinically relevant bacteria species on various modified microarchitectures to further understand bacteria behavior at the solid-liquid interface.