One necessary step to fend off a dystopian future of medical care without antibiotics is the development of new antibiotics. Another is improved deployment of existing ones, a feat which will take, among other things, better antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST). “I’m astounded that we can get men to the moon, and we are using practices [dating] almost back to the age of Robert Koch to identify bacteria,” Deborah Hung told BioWorld MedTech. “The standard practice takes amazingly long.”