Artificial intelligence-accelerated high-throughput screening of antibiotic combinations on a microfluidic combinatorial droplet system.

Journal: Lab on a chip
PMID:

Abstract

Microfluidic platforms have been employed as an effective tool for drug screening and exhibit the advantages of lower reagent consumption, higher throughput and a higher degree of automation. Despite the great advancement, it remains challenging to screen complex antibiotic combinations in a simple, high-throughput and systematic manner. Meanwhile, the large amounts of datasets generated during the screening process generally outpace the abilities of the conventional manual or semi-automatic data analysis. To address these issues, we propose an artificial intelligence-accelerated high-throughput combinatorial drug evaluation system (AI-HTCDES), which not only allows high-throughput production of antibiotic combinations with varying concentrations, but can also automatically analyze the dynamic growth of bacteria under the action of different antibiotic combinations. Based on this system, several antibiotic combinations displaying an additive effect are discovered, and the dosage regimens of each component in the combinations are determined. This strategy not only provides useful guidance in the clinical use of antibiotic combination therapy and personalized medicine, but also offers a promising tool for the combinatorial screenings of other medicines.

Authors

  • Deyu Yang
    School of Biomedical Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China. zhoujh33@mail.sysu.edu.cn.
  • Ziming Yu
    School of Biomedical Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China. zhoujh33@mail.sysu.edu.cn.
  • Mengxin Zheng
    School of Biomedical Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China. zhoujh33@mail.sysu.edu.cn.
  • Wei Yang
    Key Laboratory of Structure-Based Drug Design and Discovery (Shenyang Pharmaceutical University), Ministry of Education, School of Traditional Chinese Materia Medica, Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, Wenhua Road 103, Shenyang 110016, PR China. Electronic address: 421063202@qq.com.
  • Zhangcai Liu
    School of Biomedical Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China. zhoujh33@mail.sysu.edu.cn.
  • Jianhua Zhou
    Department of Ultrasound, Sun Yat-sen University Cancer centre, State Key Laboratory of Oncology in South China, Collaborative Innovation centre for Cancer Medicine, Guangzhou, China.
  • Lu Huang
    School of Food Science and Technology, Dalian Polytechnic University, National Engineering Research Center of Seafood, Dalian 116034, PR China.