Recent Nanotechnology Approaches for Prevention and Treatment of Biofilm-Associated Infections on Medical Devices

Abstract

Bacterial colonization in the form of biofilms on surfaces causes persistent infections and is an issue of considerable concern to healthcare providers. There is an urgent need for novel antimicrobial or antibiofilm surfaces and biomedical devices that provide protection against biofilm formation and planktonic pathogens, including antibiotic resistant strains. In this context, recent developments in the material science and engineering fields and steady progress in the nanotechnology field have created opportunities to design new biomaterials and surfaces with anti-infective, antifouling, bactericidal, and antibiofilm properties. Here we review a number of the recently developed nanotechnology-based biomaterials and explain underlying strategies used to make antibiofilm surfaces.

Multifunctional Copper-Containing Mesoporous Glass Nanoparticles as Antibacterial and Proangiogenic Agents for Chronic Wounds

“…Metal ions, such as silver and copper, are one such set of antimicrobials that are currently of interest as they can be combined with functional materials for designing healthcare devices (Gorzelanny et al, 2016;Liu et al, 2016;Ramasamy and Lee, 2016;Sun et al, 2016;Bayramov and Neff, 2017). Whilst there is some evidence that bacteria can develop resistance mechanisms to certain forms of copper and silver (Percival et al, 2005;Santo et al, 2011;Finley et al, 2015;Hobman and Crossman, 2015;Williams et al, 2016), they are still promising as antimicrobials due to their broad ranges of biocidal activity against multiple microorganisms, including both Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria.…”

Construction of Alizarin Conjugated Graphene Oxide Composites for Inhibition of Candida albicans Biofilms

“…However, impregnated chemicals alone cannot withstand the harsh in vivo biological conditions and they have shown limited applicability because of the increased resistance of biofilm microorganism [7]. Hence, researchers have now focused on conjugating effective chemical compounds that are not prone to antifungal resistance, with nanomaterials for pathogenic fungal antibiofilm therapy [8][9][10][11].…”

“…Antibiofilm strategies include organic nanoparticles; inorganic nanoparticles; polymeric nanoparticles; peptide-, gas-, ion-, or drug-releasing nanoparticles; and antimicrobial surface coating with materials including gold, chitosan, and graphene [8,9,[12][13][14][15]. Amongst them, graphene-based coatings are best suitable for the development of antibacterial surfaces due to their various surface-active sites such as oxygen bonds and hydroxyl, carbonyl, carboxylic, and epoxide groups which offer straight forward fabrication procedure with potent molecules to produce a new biocompatible antimicrobial nanocomposite [16].…”

Stability of vacancy-free crystalline phases of titanium monoxide at high pressure and temperature

“…The ab initio prediction of new crystal phases not found in nature, with an emphasis on interrelation between their structure, crystallographic defects, and electronic properties provides a promising basis for the development of technologically important materials [1,2]. Titanium monoxide materials TiO x , in bulk, low-dimensional, and nanostructured forms, are the subject of advanced investigations revealing their unique electronic, thermoelectric, optical and antibacterial properties [3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. Nonstoichiometric nature of TiO has generated a paradigm that at ambient conditions, bulk titanium monoxide is stable only if high concentration of structural vacancies is available [10].…”