Antimicrobial Screening: Foundations and Interpretation

Abstract

It is a fact that the current antimicrobial susceptibility protocols do not belong to an adequate precision personalized medicine model. In this way, these methods can predict the therapy that will fail but not the therapy that will be successful, which limits its range of action and predisposes to the appearance of antimicrobial resistance. Thus, it is necessary to develop comprehensive models of antimicrobial susceptibility that combine antibiotic activity, pharmacokinetics, and virulence factors within the same protocol in order to predict the clinical response to antimicrobial treatment. For this reason, theranostics should be the model to be used in order to develop modern biosensors capable of detecting infectious disease and determining the appropriate treatment with the ability to predict its success and cure. In this order of ideas, the objective of this chapter is to rethink the disadvantages of current susceptibility methods in order to provide comprehensive solutions that allow the development of new methods that can slow the spread of antimicrobial resistance, as well as the development of new anti-infective medications.