Qin Ning, Zhao Pei, Ho Emmanuel A, Xin Gongming, Ren Carolyn L
Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1, Canada.
School of Pharmacy, University of Waterloo, Kitchener, Ontario N2G 1C5, Canada.
ACS Sens. 2021 Jan 22;6(1):3-21. doi: 10.1021/acssensors.0c02175. Epub 2020 Dec 18.
A review on microfluidic technology for antibacterial resistance study and antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) is presented here. Antibiotic resistance has become a global health crisis in recent decades, severely threatening public health, patient care, economic growth, and even national security. It is extremely urgent that antibiotic resistance be well looked into and aggressively combated in order for us to survive this crisis. AST has been routinely utilized in determining bacterial susceptibility to antibiotics and identifying potential resistance. Yet conventional methods for AST are increasingly incompetent due to unsatisfactory test speed, high cost, and deficient reliability. Microfluidics has emerged as a powerful and very promising platform technology that has proven capable of addressing the limitation of conventional methods and advancing AST to a new level. Besides, potential technical challenges that are likely to hinder the development of microfluidic technology aimed at AST are observed and discussed. To conclude, it is noted that (1) the translation of microfluidic innovations from laboratories to be ready AST platforms remains a lengthy journey and (2) ensuring all relevant parties engaged in a collaborative and unified mode is foundational to the successful incubation of commercial microfluidic platforms for AST.
本文对用于抗生素耐药性研究和抗生素敏感性测试（AST）的微流控技术进行了综述。近几十年来，抗生素耐药性已成为全球健康危机，严重威胁着公众健康、患者护理、经济增长乃至国家安全。为了度过这场危机，深入研究并积极对抗抗生素耐药性迫在眉睫。AST已常规用于确定细菌对抗生素的敏感性并识别潜在耐药性。然而，由于测试速度不理想、成本高以及可靠性不足，传统的AST方法越来越难以胜任。微流控技术已成为一种强大且非常有前景的平台技术，已证明能够解决传统方法的局限性并将AST提升到一个新水平。此外，还观察和讨论了可能阻碍针对AST的微流控技术发展的潜在技术挑战。总之，需要注意的是：（1）将微流控创新从实验室转化为实用的AST平台仍有很长的路要走；（2）确保所有相关方以协作和统一的模式参与是成功培育用于AST的商业微流控平台的基础。
