Bacterial infections are one of the most common causes of death worldwide. That is why fast and correct therapies are a really important key for the survival of patients with such kind of diseases.
Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry entered the microbiological field some years ago, and since then, it has become an unrivaled tool because of its low cost and high accuracy. For example, identification using biochemistry takes at least one day due to growth of bacteria while MALDI-TOF takes minutes.
The following paper describes the progress toward achieving the goal of rapid susceptibility testing along with a list of related literature and studies until March 2018.