Multicenter Clinical Evaluation of Etest Meropenem-Vaborbactam (bioMérieux) for Susceptibility Testing of Enterobacterales (Enterobacteriaceae) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Meropenem-vaborbactam (MEV) is a novel carbapenem-beta-lactamase inhibitor combination antibiotic approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treatment of complicated urinary tract infections, including pyelonephritis, in adults. In this study, we evaluated the performance of Etest MEV (bioMérieux, Marcy l'Etoile, France) compared to that of broth microdilution for 629 Enterobacterales and 163 Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates. According to CLSI/FDA breakpoints, 13 Enterobacterales isolates (12 clinical and 1 challenge) were resistant to MEV. Overall, Etest MEV demonstrated 92.4% essential agreement (EA), 99.2% category agreement (CA), 0% very major errors (VME), 0% major errors (ME), and 0.8% minor errors (mE) with clinical and challenge isolates of Enterobacterales Individual species demonstrated EA rates of ≥80%, with the exception of Proteus mirabilis, for which clinical and challenge isolates demonstrated 34.3% EA, 97.1% CA, 0% ME, and 2.9% mE, precluding the use of Etest MEV with this species. Excluding P. mirabilis, MEV Etest MEV demonstrated 95.8% EA, 99.3% CA, 0% VME, 0% ME, and 0.7% mE with Enterobacterales isolates. When evaluated using European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (EUCAST) breakpoints, Etest MEV performance with clinical (16 MEV resistant) and challenge (12 MEV resistant) isolates of Enterobacterales (excluding P. mirabilis) and P. aeruginosa demonstrated an unacceptably high VME rate of 7.1% despite 95.2% EA, 99.2% CA, and 0.5% ME compared to the reference method. In conclusion, we report that Etest MEV is accurate and reproducible for MEV susceptibility testing for P. aeruginosa and Enterobacterales, with the exception of P. mirabilis, using CLSI/FDA breakpoints. Etest MEV should not be used with P. mirabilis due to unacceptable analytical performance.