Biosensors and point‐of‐care devices for bacterial detection: rapid diagnostics informing antibiotic therapy

With an exponential rise in antimicrobial resistance and stagnant antibiotic development pipeline, there is, more than ever, a crucial need to optimise current infection therapy approaches. One of the most important stage in this process requires rapid and effective identification of pathogenic bacteria responsible for diseases. Current gold standard techniques of bacterial detection include culture methods, polymerase chain reactions, and immunoassays. However, their use is fraught with downsides with high turnaround time and low accuracy being the most prominent. This imposes great limitations on their eventual application as point-of-care devices. Over time, innovative detection techniques have been proposed and developed to curb these drawbacks. In this review, we provide a systematic summary of a range of biosensing platforms with a strong focus on technologies conferring high detection sensitivity and specificity. We performed a thorough analysis and highlighted the benefits and drawbacks of each type of biosensor, discussed the factors influencing their potential as point-of-care devices, and provided our insights for their translation from proof-of-concept systems into commercial medical devices