A Portable, Automatic Microfluidic System for Rapid Personalized Antibiotic Screening

This study reported a portable microfluidic system which can be used to automatically perform antibiotic screening with single antibiotic, double antibiotic combinations and even triple antibiotic combinations on clinically isolated bacteria strains. With the incorporation of the integrated pneumatically-driven microfluidic chip, a pneumatic control module, a temperature control module, and an optical detection module, the developed system was capable of achieving significant improvement of operation flexibility as well as cost reduction for determination of antimicrobial susceptibility test and the efficacy of drug combinations via colorimetric results within 4 hours. Personalized antibiotic screening may be realized by using the developed microfluidic system for rapid clinical decision-making.