When a bacterial infection reaches the bloodstream, every second is critical. The person’s life is on the line. Yet blood tests to identify bacteria take hours to days. While waiting, doctors often prescribe broad-spectrum antibiotics in hopes of killing whatever bug may be at fault.
This"bioprinter” spits out tiny drops of blood quickly — more than 1,000 per second. Shine a laser on the drops — using a light-based imaging technique called Raman spectroscopy — and the bacteria’s unique cellular"fingerprint” is revealed. "It kind of wound up being this really interesting historical period where we could put the pieces together from different technologies, including nanophotonics, printing, and artificial intelligence, to help accelerate identification of bacteria in these complex samples,” says study author Jennifer Dionne, PhD, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford.
"The promise of our technique is that you don't need to have a culture of cells to put the antibiotic on top,” says Dionne."What we're finding is that from the Raman scattering, we can use that to identify — even without incubating with antibiotics — which drug the bacteria would respond to, and that's really exciting.”
"Sometimes, despite your best guess, you're wrong,” Watkins says,"and obviously, the patient could have an adverse outcome. So, if you can diagnose the pathogen sooner, that is ideal. Whatever technology enables clinicians to do that is definitely progress and a step forward.”