News from China Central Broadcasting Network on November 11 (Reporter Yang Jing) Recently, Professor Liu Runhui’s team from the School of Materials Science and Engineering of East China University of Science and Technology and Professor Lin Haodong’s team from Shanghai First People’s Hospital have prepared antibacterial peptides based on host defense peptide simulations. Polymer-doped PMMA (polymethyl methacrylate) bone cement microspheres (PMMA@polymer) show excellent in vivo therapeutic effects in a rabbit model of chronic osteomyelitis.
The result was published in Advanced Functional Materials with the title "Polypeptide polymer-doped bone cement can effectively treat chronic osteomyelitis caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infection".
The treatment of chronic osteomyelitis usually requires multiple operations and long-term antibiotic intervention, and the risk of recurrence is high, which brings huge pain and economic burden to patients.
At present, PMMA bone cement loaded with antibiotics has been widely used in clinical treatment of chronic osteomyelitis.
However, the release of antibiotics in non-degradable PMMA bone cement is usually slow and incomplete, resulting in insufficient antibiotic concentration in focal lesions and poor therapeutic effects.
In addition, the rapid emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has brought great challenges to the treatment of chronic osteomyelitis.
Therefore, there is an urgent need to find an effective strategy for non-antibiotic therapy to treat chronic osteomyelitis caused by drug-resistant bacterial infection.
In this study, the peptide polymer can be released from inert PMMA quickly, quickly onset, and almost completely released, overcoming the inherent shortcomings of insufficient release of antibiotic bone cement.
Polypeptide polymer, as a mimic of host defense peptides (HDPs), not only has high antibacterial activity, it can kill 99.99% of bacteria within 1 hour, but also is not easy to induce bacterial resistance. Continuous use of polypeptide polymer stimulates more than 200 generations The bacteria have not acquired resistance.
Dr. Wu Yueming from East China University of Science and Technology and Dr. Lin Yaofa from Shanghai First People’s Hospital are the co-first authors of the paper. Professor Liu Runhui from East China University of Science and Technology and Professor Lin Haodong from Shanghai First People’s Hospital are co-corresponding authors.
The research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and other funds.