Colonization of medical devices by staphylococci

Abstract

The use of medical devices in modern medicine is constantly increasing. Despite the multiple precautionary strategies that are being employed in hospitals, which include increased hygiene and sterilization measures, bacterial infections on these devices still happen frequently. Staphylococci are among the major causes of medical device infection. This is mostly due to the strong capacity of those bacteria to form device-associated biofilms, which provide resistance to chemical and physical treatments as well as attacks by the host's immune system. Biofilm development is a multistep process with specific factors participating in each step. It is tightly regulated to provide a balance between biofilm expansion and detachment. Detachment from a biofilm on a medical device can lead to severe systemic infection, such as bacteremia and sepsis. While our understanding of staphylococcal biofilm formation has increased significantly and staphylococcal biofilm formation on medical devices is among the best understood biofilm-associated infections, the extensive effort put in preclinical studies with the goal to find novel therapies against staphylococcal device-associated infections has not yet resulted in efficient, applicable therapeutic options for that difficult-to-treat type of disease.

Healthcare-Associated Infections in Subjects With Severe Acquired Brain Injury: The Effect of Microbial Colonization on the Functional Outcome. Data From a Multicenter Observational Study

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The Skin Microbiota: Balancing Risk and Reward

“…S. epidermidis also produces proteases that promote its adherence to plastic (EcpA), degrade host AMPs, and evade elimination by immune cells (SepA, APS) (Cheung et al, 2010;Martínez-García et al, 2018). These mechanisms highlight potential reasons why S. epidermidis is prone to cause device-associated infections and is the most common microbe associated with such (Zheng et al, 2018). Recently, the S. epidermidis protease EcpA was identified as a factor contributing to tissue destruction and inflammation in the monogenetic skin disorder Netherton syndrome (Williams et al, 2020), highlighting how host-dependent interactions with the resident skin microbiota can impact disease severity.…”

Antibiofilm activity of flavonoids on staphylococcal biofilms through targeting BAP amyloids

“…Staphylococcus aureus is one of the leading bacteria causing biofilm‐associated infections related with medical devices 1 . The difficulty of treating such infections is aggravated by the intrinsic resistance to antibiotics given by the biofilm structures produced by these bacteria 2 – 4 .…”