While we've seen antibacterial wound dressings before, Italian scientists have taken the idea to new extremes. They've created a material that kills multiple types of harmful bacteria, and it does so using tiny flowers.
If you've never heard of nanoflowers, they're microscopic structures made up of nanosheets of material which self-assemble into three-dimensional clusters.
The "petals" of each flower pack a huge amount of surface area into a small space, allowing the structures to be heavily loaded with therapeutic substances. For this reason, the technology has previously been utilized for targeted drug delivery within the body.
This time around, Fatemeh Ahmadpoor, Pier Francesco Ferrari and colleagues at the University of Genoa set out to develop antibacterial nanoflowers. The structures were grown in a saline solution, and were composed of tannic acid and copper phosphate.
Tannic acid is a member of a group of plant-derived chemicals known as polyphenols. Among other things, polyphenols reduce oxidative stress, kill bacteria, and reduce inflammation in body tissue. Copper phosphate boosts polyphenols' ability to do these things.
The scientists proceeded to attach their nanoflowers to strips of electrospun nanofiber fabric. If you really want to know, that fabric was specifically composed of "poly(caprolactone)-coated gum arabic–poly(vinyl alcohol) nanofibers."
In lab tests, the strips eradicated cultured harmful bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa on contact. Importantly, however, the fabric didn’t damage lab-grown human cells, and was otherwise shown to be fully biocompatible.
As an added benefit, the dressing should also be relatively easy and inexpensive to produce on a commercial scale.
A paper on the research was recently published in the journal ACS Applied Bio Materials.
Source: American Chemical Society