Combinatorial Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing Enabled by Non-Contact Printing

We demonstrate the utility of non-contact printing to fabricate the mAST—an easy-to-operate, microwell-based microfluidic device for combinatorial antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) in a point-of-care format. The wells are prefilled with antibiotics in any desired concentration and combination by non-contact printing (spotting). For the execution of the AST, the only requirements are the mAST device, the sample, and the incubation chamber. Bacteria proliferation can be continuously monitored by using an absorbance reader. We investigate the profile of resistance of two reference Escherichia coli strains, report the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) for single antibiotics, and assess drug–drug interactions in cocktails by using the Bliss independence model.