Microfluidics as a Novel Technique for Tuberculosis: From Di-agnostics to Drug Discovery

Abstract

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a global healthcare crisis with an estimated 10 million new cases and 1.4 million deaths per year TB is caused by infection with the major human pathogen Mycobacte-rium tuberculosis, which is difficult to rapidly diagnose and treat. There is an urgent need for new methods of diagnosis, sufficient in vitro models which capably mimic all physiological condi-tions of the infection, and high-throughput drug screening platforms. Microfluidic-based tech-niques provide single-cell analysis which reduces experimental time, the cost of reagents, and have been extremely useful for gaining insight into monitoring microorganisms. This review out-lines the field of microfluidics and discusses the use of this novel technique so far in M. tuberculo-sis diagnostics, research methods, and drug discovery platforms. The practices of microfluidics have promising future applications for diagnosing and treating TB.

The evolving biology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis drug resistance

“…Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging has brought to light the heterogeneity of TB lesions in live animals and humans (Lenaerts et al, 2015). Microfluidics (Molloy et al, 2021) and time-lapse microscopy (Herricks et al, 2020) are revealing the complexity of Mtb populations in vitro, and reporter gene technology (Huang et al, 2019) is providing similar insights in vivo.…”