More Timely Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing as a Tool in Combatting Antimicrobial Resistance in Clinically Relevant Microorganisms: Is There More than One Way to Skin a Cat?

The prudent use of antibiotic therapy by eliminating unnecessary treatment while placing infected patients on narrow-spectrum directed therapy as quickly as possible is the ultimate goal of all antimicrobial stewardship programs. Going hand-in-hand with this objective is the development of antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) methods that provide results to prescribing clinicians in less time with a high level of accuracy. Recently, several novel approaches toward this end have been developed and published. Here, we provide a review of a number of these methods, along with a brief discussion of how one of them—whole-genome sequencing—might represent a quantum leap into the future of clinical microbiology.