Panbacterial real-time PCR to evaluate bacterial burden in chronic wounds treated with Cutimed™ Sorbact™

Abstract

The impact of polymicrobial bacterial infection on chronic wounds has been studied extensively, but standard bacteriological analysis is not always sensitive enough. Molecular approaches represent a promising alternative to the standard bacteriological analysis. This work aimed to assess the usefulness of a panbacterial quantitative real-time PCR reaction to quantitate the total bacterial load in chronic wounds treated with Cutimed™ Sorbact™, a novel therapeutic approach based on hydrophobic binding of bacteria to a membrane. The results obtained by panbacterial real-time PCR on conserved sequences of the bacterial 16S gene show that the bacterial burden significantly decreased in 10 out of 15 healing chronic wounds, and did not change in 5 out of 5 non-healing chronic wounds. On the contrary, classical culture for S. aureus and P. aeruginosa, and real-time PCR for Bacteroides and Fusobacterium did not show any correlation with the clinical outcome. Our study also shows that quantification of chronic wounds by panbacterial real-time PCR is to be performed on biopsies and not on swabs. These results show that panbacterial real-time PCR is a promising and quick method of determining the total bacterial load in chronic wounds, and suggest that it might be an important biomarker for the prognosis of chronic wounds under treatment.

Fusobacterium nucleatum associates with stages of colorectal neoplasia development, colorectal cancer and disease outcome

“…Cycle threshold (CT) was calculated using the SDS software on the ABI 7500 system. A qPCR assay for levels of the common Bacteroides genus was used as an internal control in the stool samples [32]. Samples that showed no amplification within 60 cycles were censored and assumed no template present or below detection limit.…”

“…Previously published primer and probes were used [20,32] were assessed by binary logistic regression to assess influence of Fn levels on disease group. Further, associations between Fn levels and disease progression were analysed by Spearman correlation analysis.…”

Clinical efficacy of dialkylcarbamoylchloride‐coated cotton acetate dressing versus combination of normal saline dressing and 2% mupirocin ointment in infected wounds of epidermolysis bullosa

“…Another study by Gentili, Glanesini, and Balboni (2012) reported that 75% of the wounds showed a decrease in the bacterial count in the group treated with DACC-coated cotton acetate dressing. Cutting and McGuire (2015) Based on these results, it is found that DACC-coated cotton acetate dressing can be used as an alternative for infected wounds without the risk of bacterial resistance.…”

Binding of two bacterial biofilms to dialkyl carbamoyl chloride (DACC)-coated dressings in vitro

“…Clinical observations indicated that Cutimed® Sorbact® resulted in completely successful therapy of 7 out of 20 patients and an improvement for 9 further patients, but an analysis of information on bacterial load obtained from wound swabs taken from the same patients did not correlate with clinical outcome. 11 This raises the importance of considering the differential effects of topical interventions on bacterial species unequally distributed throughout the wound environment. 12 Biofilm is not universally located at the surface of the wound 13 and it may be embedded within deeper tissue where it may not be affected by a therapy confined to the wound bed.…”