Simple and low‐cost antibiotic susceptibility testing for <i>Mycobacterium tuberculosis</i> using screen‐printed electrodes

Abstract One quarter of the global population is thought to be latently infected by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) with it estimated that 1 in 10 of those people will go on to develop active disease. Due to the fact that M. tuberculosis (TB) is a disease most often associated with low‐ and middle‐income countries, it is critical that low‐cost and easy‐to‐use technological solutions are developed, which can have a direct impact on diagnosis and prescribing practice for TB. One area where intervention could be particularly useful is antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST). This work presents a low‐cost, simple‐to‐use AST sensor that can detect drug susceptibility on the basis of changing RNA abundance for the typically slow‐growing M. tuberculosis (TB) pathogen in 96 h using screen‐printed electrodes and standard molecular biology laboratory reactionware. In order to find out the sensitivity of applied sensor platform, a different concentration (10 8 –10 3 CFU/mL) of M. tuberculosis was performed, and limit of detection and limit of quantitation were calculated as 10 3.82 and 10 11.59 CFU/mL, respectively. The results display that it was possible to detect TB sequences and distinguish antibiotic‐treated cells from untreated cells with a label‐free molecular detection. These findings pave the way for the development of a comprehensive, low‐cost, and simple‐to‐use AST system for prescribing in TB and multidrug‐resistant tuberculosis.