Advances in Microfluidic Technologies for Diagnostic Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Bacterial detection plays a vital role in public safety, medicine, food protection and security.  Also, the World Health Organization (WHO) has identified infectious diseases as a part of the top five causes of death in the world ranging from lower respiratory tract infections to diarrhoeal diseases (WHO fact sheet 2019).

Moreover, the rapid uncontrolled growth of antibiotics microbial resistance is widely admitted nowadays, as a global public health problem. Also, antibiotics resistance could occur naturally, but misusing or overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals speeds up the rate of antibiotic resistance. Besides, traditional methods for bacterial identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) suffer from a time-consuming process (typically takes 1 and 2 days) to get an accurate and reliable result, which fails them in the early and critical stages of bacterial infection. For instance, the mortality rate is elevated by 7.6% for each hour antibiotic treatment is delayed for patients with sepsis and septic shock. 

Furthermore, the global risk of viral disease outbreaks e.g. the coronavirus pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), emphasizes the demand for precise, and rapid detection methods to accelerate the diagnostics process.

There is an urgent need for developing a novel technology for rapid and accurate diagnosis of infectious disease and drug testing, therefore, the main subject of this Special Issue includes advancements in microfluidics and biosensors technology for diagnosis of infectious diseases.

Besides, manuscripts papers on other related fields are also welcome, such as:

• Micro- and nanotechnology for detection of pathogenic microorganisms, such as bacteria, viruses, parasites, or fungi
• Point-of-care platform for viral and bacterial infections
• Microengineering for drug testing, antimicrobial susceptibility testing and antiviral susceptibility assay
• Microfabrication technology for microbiology study
• Microfluidic approach for Cell-Cell Communication in Bacteria
• Microengineering and metabolomics for medical microbiology
• Microfluidic and biomarker discovery for infectious diseases
• Numerical Simulations approach for the bacterial or viral study
• Organ‐on‐chip models to study bacterial or viral infections

Dr. Mehdi Mohammadi
Dr. Ali Pormohammad
Dr. Mohammad Zarei
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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