Integrated Microfluidic Chip for Rapid Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing Directly from Positive Blood Cultures

Rapid and accurate antimicrobial prescriptions are critical for bloodstream infection (BSI) patients, as they can guide drug use and decrease mortality significantly. The traditional antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) for BSI is time-consuming and tedious, taking 2-3 days. Avoiding lengthy monoclonal cultures and shortening the drug sensitivity incubation time are keys to accelerating the AST. Here, we introduced a bacteria separation integrated AST (BSI-AST) chip, which could extract bacteria directly from positive blood cultures (PBCs) within 10 min and quickly give susceptibility information within 3 h. The integrated chip includes a bacteria separation chamber, multiple AST chambers, and connection channels. The separator gel was first preloaded into the bacteria separation chamber, enabling the swift separation of bacteria cells from PBCs through on-chip centrifugation. Then, the bacteria suspension was distributed in the AST chambers with preloaded antibiotics through a quick vacuum-assisted aliquoting strategy. Through centrifuge-assisted on-chip enrichment, detectable growth of the phenotype under different antibiotics could be easily observed in the taper tips of AST chambers within a few hours. As a proof of concept, direct AST from artificial PBCs with Escherichia coli against 18 antibiotics was performed on the BSI-AST chip, and the whole process from bacteria extraction to AST result output was less than 3.5 h. Moreover, the integrated chip was successfully applied to the diagnosis of clinical PBCs, showing 93.3% categorical agreement with clinical standard methods. The reliable and fast pathogen characterization of the integrated chip suggested its great potential application in clinical diagnosis.

Automated summary

This study introduced a bacteria separation integrated AST chip that can extract bacteria from positive blood cultures and provide susceptibility information quickly. The chip has the potential to be a fast and reliable tool for pathogen characterization in clinical diagnosis.