A miniaturized semiconductor biochip to identify drug-resistant pathogens

Evolving strains of multi-drug resistant pathogens are a growing global concern, outpacing drug discovery efforts and undermining the efficacy of existing antibiotics. The development of comprehensive diagnostics for clinical applications will become crucial to control escalating health risks. Existing laboratory tests to diagnose infectious disease are generally carried out via culture-based methods that usually take days to generate results. Rapid molecular diagnostic tests can comparatively identify microbial nucleic acids (NA) in clinical samples directly in less than an hour with nucleic acid amplification tests (NAATs). Existing NAATs are, however, limited by inadequate levels of multiplexing (i.e. the number of strains or sequences detected in a single reaction) and inaccuracies with detecting mutations.