Here’s what you should know.
1. Lloyd Miller, MD, PhD, teamed up with engineering professor Hai-Quan Mao, PhD, and member of the Institute for NanoBio Technology to develop a thin, biodegradable, antibiotic releasing plastic coating.
2. The researchers added three antibiotics to the coating and tracked the rates it released it over a period of time.
3. The researchers then used the coating to coat Kirschner wires and inserted them into the knee joints of anesthetized mice. At the same time they injected the mice with a strain of Staphylococcus aureus engineered to give off light.
They then tracked the infection noninvasively over time.
4. After 14 days the mice treated with the antibiotic-free coating had abundant bacteria in infected tissue around the knee joint and 80 percent has bacteria on the knee implant.
The researchers found the joints coated with the nanofiber had no detectable bacteria on the implants or surrounding tissue.
5. After the study completed, researchers removed the joints and adjacent bones in the mice. They found that bone loss, which is often seen near infected joints, had been avoided in the animals that received the antibiotic-loaded coating.
6. More research is needed to see the effectiveness of the coating in humans.
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