A new technique which slashes the time taken to diagnose microbial infections from days to minutes could help save lives and open up a new front in the battle against antibiotic resistance, researchers say.

Engineers and clinicians from the UK and China are behind the breakthrough system, called AutoEnricher. It combines microfluidic technology with sophisticated analysis and machine learning to enable the diagnosis of pathogens in just 20 minutes.

The team’s paper, titled “Rapid culture-free diagnosis of clinical pathogens via integrated microfluidic-Raman micro-spectroscopy,” is published in Nature Communications.