Multicenter Clinical Evaluation of Vitek 2 Meropenem-Vaborbactam for Susceptibility Testing of Enterobacterales and Pseudomonas aeruginosa

The carbapenem/beta-lactamase inhibitor meropenem-vaborbactam (MEV) used to treat complicated urinary tract infections and pyelonephritis in adults was approved in 2017 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Here, we evaluated Vitek 2 MEV (bioMérieux, Durham, NC) compared to the reference broth microdilution (BMD) method. Of 449 Enterobacterales isolates analyzed per FDA/CLSI breakpoints, the overall performance was 98.2% essential agreement (EA), 98.7% category agreement (CA), and 0% very major errors (VME) or major errors (ME). For 438 FDA intended-for-use Enterobacterales isolates, performance was 98.2% EA, 98.6% CA, and 0% VME or ME. Evaluable EA was 81.0%, but with only 42 on-scale evaluable results. Individual species demonstrated EA and CA rates of ≥90% without any VME or ME. When evaluated using European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (EUCAST) breakpoints, overall Vitek 2 MEV performance for Enterobacterales and Pseudomonas aeruginosa demonstrated 97.3% EA, 99.2% CA, 2.3% VME, and 0.6% ME (after error resolution: 97.3% EA, 99.4% CA, 2.2% VME, and 0.4% ME) compared to the reference BMD method. Performance for P. aeruginosa included 92.2% EA, 97.4% CA, 0% VME, and 3.0% ME (after error resolution: 92.2% EA, 98.7% CA, 0% VME, and 1.5% ME). Performance for Enterobacterales included 98.2% EA, 99.6% CA, 3.0% VME, and 0.2% ME. Evaluable EA was 80.6% but was based on only 67 evaluable results. These findings support Vitek 2 MEV as an accurate automated system for MEV susceptibility testing of Enterobacterales and P. aeruginosa and could be an alternate solution to the manual-labor-intensive reference BMD method.