Sagar Narhari Agnihotri

Sagar joined the EMBLA group in November 2021 to work on droplet microfluidics-based systems to detect bacterial hetero-resistance in blood infections.

Dr. Sagar N. Agnihotri is a post-doctoral researcher at Uppsala University, Sweden, specializing in microfluidics for healthcare and point-of-care diagnostics. His research focuses on microfluidics, microfabrication, computational fluid dynamics, and innovative product development using advanced techniques such as 3D printing. With prior post-doctoral experience at Northeastern University, USA, he has contributed significantly to areas like immunotherapy applications, single-cell analysis, and two-phase flow systems. Dr. Agnihotri completed his Ph.D. at IIT Bombay in collaboration with Monash University, where he investigated droplet breakup in microfluidic systems. He holds an M.Tech in Thermal and Fluid Engineering and a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from GCE, Amravati.

Antibiotic resistance is a serious medical challenge that puts patients at risk of untreatable bacterial infections and threatens major advances in modern medicine that rely on antibiotics. To tackle this problem, innovative diagnostic tools are required to quickly identify resistances and choose the correct antibiotic for treatment. A challenge with identifying if the cells are susceptible or resistant to the antibiotics prescribed is that a population of bacterial cells can show heterogeneity and transient changes in terms of their susceptibility to the antibiotic. This can lead to an erroneous antibiotic choice and a resulting treatment failure. Droplet microfluidics offers unique advantages like lower fluid and associated costs, reagent consumption, and higher throughput. Hence droplet-based microfluidics can offer a faster, more efficient, and low-cost method with the ability to detect even single bacteria for antibiotic resistance compared to the agar plate-based methods.