Date of Award
5-1-2024
Degree Name
Master of Science
Department
Biomedical Engineering
First Advisor
Li, Hui
Abstract
Antibiotic resistance in bacteria is currently one of the greatest threats to health and safety. Antibiotic-resistant infections are on the rise due to the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, allowing for more bacteria to gain resistance to them. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) determines the minimum amount of antibiotic the bacteria is susceptible to, but this process can take days to provide results. A solution to this problem would be rapid AST methods that could provide clinicians with results in a timely manner which would allow for personalized antibiotic treatment strategies during the patient’s visit. Microfluidic devices have been proposed to be a viable alternative, allowing for the bacteria to be captured, monitored, and analyzed at the single-cell level. In this thesis, a microfluidic device is designed and developed to implement single-cell analysis. This allows for the measurement of bacterial growth in response to the applied antibiotics and the quantification of the bacterial resistance profiles within a few cell cycles, all in a period of hours. This prototype device is evaluated by testing the antibiotic resistance of Escherichia coli (E. coli), a commonly found urinary tract infection agent, in response to first-line antibiotics. The results obtained from the microfluidic device correspond with the standard broth microdilution method, suggesting its clinical feasibility. Finally, the future development directions are discussed to improve the device design and possibly facilitate its deployment in the future.
Access
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