Vol. 6, Issue 2, Part C (2024)

Over the past 20 years, there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of new antibiotics developed through the purposeful use of antimicrobial agents. This growth has been attributed to extensive research efforts that have taken advantage of the expanding body of knowledge describing the interactions between antibiotics and their targets in bacterial cells. The development of additional classes of antimicrobial drugs has frequently benefited from knowledge gathered from one class. When it came to beta-lactams, data on the correlations between structure and activity obtained from cephalosporins and penicillins was quickly applied to cephamycins, monobactams, penems, and carbapenems to find drugs with a significantly higher potency that were broad-spectrum. For patients to receive the best possible care, a pathogen's resistance to antibiotics must be quickly identified, and the proper antimicrobial treatment must then be administered. Traditional techniques for detecting bacterial resistance, like automated instruments, broth microdilution, and disc diffusion, are mainly standardized and are frequently employed. However, the results cannot be retrieved before 48 hours after the sample is received, which could result in the misuse or prolonged usage of broad-spectrum antibiotics. Therefore, there is a need to create and implement new, quicker, standardized, sensitive, focused, and reliable procedures with consistent outcomes into everyday microbiological laboratory practice. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) of bacterial pathogens is a crucial procedure in clinical microbiology laboratories to ascertain susceptibility to antimicrobial drugs and identify potential drug resistance. This study focuses on the tools and techniques that can be used in clinical microbiology labs to assess the effectiveness of antibiotics, both now and in the near future.