A high-throughput cell culture system based on capillary and centrifugal actions for rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing.

Antibiotic resistance is a global threat to modern society. Rapid determination of suitable antibiotics that inhibit bacterial growth can effectively reduce antibiotic resistance and improve clinical treatment. The conventional methods of antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) depend on optical density measurements, which require long-time incubation.

A rapid culture system uninfluenced by an inoculum effect increases reliability and convenience for drug susceptibility testing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

The Disc Agarose Channel (DAC) system utilizes microfluidics and imaging technologies and is fully automated and capable of tracking single cell growth to produce Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) drug susceptibility testing (DST) results within 3~7 days. In particular, this system can be easily used to perform DSTs without the fastidious preparation of the inoculum of MTB cells. Inoculum effect is one of the major problems that causes DST errors.