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.

中文翻译：

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微流控技术用于抗菌药耐药性研究和药敏试验的回顾与展望

本文介绍了用于抗药性研究和抗生素敏感性测试（AST）的微流控技术综述。抗生素耐药性已成为近几十年来的全球性健康危机，严重威胁着公共卫生，患者护理，经济增长甚至国家安全。迫切需要认真研究并积极抗击抗生素耐药性，以使我们能够度过这场危机。AST已被常规用于确定细菌对抗生素的敏感性并确定潜在的耐药性。然而，由于测试速度不令人满意，成本高和可靠性不足，用于AST的常规方法越来越不称职。微流体技术已经成为一种功能强大且非常有前途的平台技术，已被证明能够解决传统方法的局限性并将AST提升到一个新的水平。此外，观察和讨论了可能阻碍针对AST的微流体技术发展的潜在技术挑战。总而言之，要指出的是，（1）将实验室的微流体创新转化为可使用的AST平台仍需漫长的旅程，并且（2）确保所有相关方以协作和统一的方式参与是成功孵化商业微流体的基础AST的平台。