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Bacterial Cell Culture as the Foundational Pillar in Infectious Disease Diagnostics and the Accelerating Search for Next-Generation Antibiotics and Drug Therapies
Bacterial cell culture remains the indispensable, foundational technology underpinning infectious disease diagnostics and drug discovery, acting as the critical workhorse in both clinical microbiology labs and pharmaceutical research pipelines globally. In clinical settings, the ability to isolate, grow, and identify pathogenic bacteria from patient samples is the gold standard for confirming a diagnosis, determining the causative agent of an infection, and, most crucially, performing antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST). This traditional culture-based approach provides essential phenotypic data that informs targeted patient treatment, preventing the overuse of broad-spectrum antibiotics and helping to combat the global crisis of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Despite the emergence of rapid molecular diagnostic techniques, culture provides the live organism necessary for comprehensive strain characterization, epidemiology tracking, and long-term storage in biobanks. The escalating rate of healthcare-associated infections…