A Novel Screen for Biofilm Inhibitors in Animals
Abstract
One of the major research efforts of the Department of Defense (DoD) is to improve the care of wounded military personnel. It is hard to imagine a more important research priority for the U.S. Military. Aside from the wound itself, the greatest threat to wounded personnel is infection. One-third of the wounded get infections as they are treated in hospitals and in the field. Antibiotics are the main tools against infection, but microbes can avoid antibiotics by forming attached colonies known as biofilms. These collections of bacteria and other microbes attach to surfaces inside the wound and surround themselves with slime. The slime prevents the antibiotic from getting to the microbes, and so they resist treatment. Biofilms can be deadly. The DoD has targeted the treatment of biofilms as a goal to help wounded personnel survive and recover more quickly. This goal has been set within the Topic Area of Antimicrobial Resistance and the specific subject of ?Development of novel and/or innovative therapies that prevent and/or interrupt biofilm production in wound infections and infected hardware models.? Biofilms also attach to the surfaces of implants and other medical materials in the body, and they are responsible for heart valve infections, lung infections, and many others. We have designed a new method to identify substances that can be used to disrupt biofilms. We plan to develop this method and screen many substances for the ability to safely treat biofilms in the body. The method involves detecting the microbes by engineering them to emit light. We can then follow infections in live animals over time using a camera that detects the light through the tissue of the living animal. This detection method can also be used to measure biofilm cultures. We plan to use this method to screen substances that disrupt the biofilm cultures, and then use the same detection method in animals. The combination of these observations will allow us to not only test for biofilm disruption in the cultures, but also use the same system to test biofilms in wounds in animals. We can rapidly test many substances for the ability to safely treat these microbial infections and help our wounded personnel to survive and recover more quickly.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 05, 2019
- Source ID
- W81XWH1910051XX0
Entities
People
- Jonathan Hardy
Organizations
- Michigan State University
- United States Army