With
the increasing clinical use of invasive medical devices, various
healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) caused by bacterial biofilm
colonization of biomedical devices have posed serious threats to patients.
The formation of biofilms makes it much more difficult and costly
to treat infections. Here, we report a nitric oxide (NO)-releasing
gold nanocage (AuNC@NO) that is stimulated by near-infrared (NIR)
irradiation to deliver NO and generate hyperthermia for biofilm elimination.
AuNC@NO was prepared by immobilizing a temperature-responsive NO donor
onto gold nanocages (AuNCs) through thiolâgold interactions.
AuNC@NO possesses stable and excellent photothermal conversion efficiency,
as well as the characteristics of slow NO release at physiological
temperature and on-demand quick NO release under NIR irradiation.
Based on these features, AuNC@NO exhibits enhanced in vitro bactericidal and antibiofilm efficacy compared with AuNCs, which
could achieve 4 orders of magnitude bacterial reduction and 85.4%
biofilm elimination under NIR irradiation. In addition, we constructed
an implant biofilm infection model and a subcutaneous biofilm infection
model to evaluate the anti-infective effect of AuNC@NO. The in vivo results indicated that after 5 min of 0.5 W cmâ2 NIR irradiation, NO release from AuNC@NO was significantly
accelerated, which induced the dispersal of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) biofilms and synergized
with photothermal therapy (PTT) to kill planktonic MRSA that had lost
its biofilm protection. Meanwhile, the surrounding tissues showed
little damage because of controlled photothermal temperature and toxicity.
In view of the above-mentioned results, the AuNC@NO nanocomposite
developed in this work reveals potential application prospects as
a useful antibiofilm agent in the field of biofilm-associated infection
treatment.