DropCarba – An automated magnetic digital microfluidic platform for rapid phenotypic testing of carbapenemase-producing Gram-negative bacilli

Carbapenemase-producing Gram-negative bacilli (CPGNB) is a type of antibiotic-resistant pathogens that often lead to severe clinical consequences. Phenotypic tests, such as Carba NP and blue Carba, are able to detect the resistant mechanism and provide rapid detection of carbapenemase producers to potentially guide personalized therapy. However, these tests require relatively tedious hands-on fluidic operations, and the assay format is ill-suited for automation and parallelization for improved throughput. In this study, we report an automated magnetic digital microfluidics-based platform, known as DropCarba, for parallel CPGNB detection in droplets. It automates the entire carbapenemase testing process and eliminates the need for almost all hands-on fluidic operations, which ensures high consistency and minimizes human errors with a simple “press-and-go” operation. DropCarba was validated with a large number of bacterial isolates of various Enterobacterales species (200 strains in total with 100 CPGNB and 100 non-resistant strains) in a blinded manner, and the results agree well with the benchmark Carba NP. DropCarba, with its full automation, simple operation, reduced reagent consumption, parallelization processing, and scalable manufacturing, will greatly improve CPGNB screening and make a valuable contribution to our fight against antibiotic resistance.