Highly potent antimicrobial polyionenes with rapid killing kinetics, skin biocompatibility and in vivo bactericidal activity

Macromolecular-clustered facial amphiphilic antimicrobials

“…Consequently, deoxycholic acid-containing polymer DCA_19k_5 exhibited moderate sensitivity towards bacteria while LCA_20k_5 is least effective towards bacteria. Our results demonstrated that the higher charge densities of a polymer could lead to more significant interactions with bacterial membranes, similar to observations made by Yang and colleagues 46 , 47 . Though all polymers can inhibit bacterial growth, they again exhibited enhanced potency towards Gram-negative bacteria.…”

“…As mentioned previously, the hydrophobic and hydrophilic balance of an antimicrobial polymer plays a critical role for the selective attachment to a bacterial cell membrane. It is well established that a polymer with higher hydrophobicity or lower hydrophilicity produces hemolysis to a greater extent, due to the strong interaction with the lipid portion of a mammalian cell membrane 25 , 47 , 54 . As shown in Table 1 , all cholic acid polymers exhibited negligible hemolysis at their respective MIC values, demonstrating excellent selectivity toward a broad range of pathogenic microbes over mammalian cells.…”

Facially amphiphilic polyionene biocidal polymers derived from lithocholic acid

“…They are generally prepared from a reaction between ditertiary amines and dihalides via Menschutkin reaction [ 41 , 42 ]. These polymers exhibit strong and fast acting antimicrobial activities [ [43] , [44] , [45] ]. However, little is known regarding the preparation of hydrophobic polyionenes that incorporate natural product-derived chemicals targeted for antimicrobial applications.…”

Degradable Cationic Polymer: A Class of Material to Address Bacteria Resistance

“…It has been reported that even for the small QACs, increasing charge center number from one to two will significantly reduce the probability of emergence of resistance. A variety of polycations have been tested as potential antimicrobials and the resistance development is also taken into consideration, including polyionenes [12,13] and polymers acquired from controlled polymerization with charged groups installed onto side chain [11,[14][15][16][17]. Currently the antimicrobial resistance has been characterized mainly through two dimensions.…”

“…The most common way is to monitor MIC (minimum inhibition concentration) changes after repeated use of drugs at sub-lethal doses. This assay usually requires weeks of time for exposing certain concentration of healthy bacteria cells at logarithmic growth phase to a series of drug solution with varying concentration, thus not trivial to perform conventional antibiotics, such as ciprofloxacin, have become the most popular benchmark to be compared with novel cationic polymer in this method [12]. It has been clearly proved that cationic polymer has great potential in reducing the rate of resistance development, however, the comparison between different types of cationic polymers is still lacking.…”