Photonic Data Science

Bloodstream infections caused by resistant bacteria pose an increasing global health threat and contribute to increased morbidity, mortality and healthcare costs. The need for rapid and reliable diagnostics to detect antibiotic resistance is therefore more urgent than ever. The RamanBioAssay™ combines dielectrophoresis-based bacterial detection with Raman spectroscopy to enable rapid phenotypic antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) directly from clinical isolates. We have applied the platform to E. coli, S. aureus and K. pneumoniae treated with ciprofloxacin, oxacillin and meropenem, respectively. Importantly, it was able to distinguish between susceptible and resistant isolates, including rare and diagnostically difficult cases such as mecC-positive S. aureus and Gram-negative strains with complex resistance profiles. The RBA provided results within ≤ 3 hours and showed high concordance with the standard AST. These results underline the robustness of the platform and highlight that it is a powerful tool for rapid, genotype-independent phenotypic AST that can enable the detection of elusive resistance and support targeted therapy.