Biology


High-throughput screening has long been successfully used to create new medicines, but a team from the University of Nottingham has now used the same method to identify a group of polyacrylates that are highly resistant to bacterial attachment. This could mark the start of a new era for medical devices, which have recently been implicated in numerous cases of healthcare associated infections


High-throughput screening yields antibacterial materials


Anyone working in the field of drug discovery will be throughput


familiar with screening, a method


high- of


scientific experimentation that allows one to rapidly conduct vast numbers of tests. Traditionally, this has allowed researchers to identify compounds (from among millions of candidates) that can modulate specific biomolecular pathways, providing an invaluable head start in the long process of creating new medicines. But what if you were to use this method in a completely different field, for instance in the development of new materials? That is


Professor Morgan


exactly what a team led by Alexander


at the


University of Nottingham have set out to do, and the results have been rewarding.


58


Their first paper, published in Nature Materials in 2010, described a new synthetic surface that allows stem cells to stay


alive and continue reproducing


themselves - a trait which had previously been notoriously difficult to achieve. Their attentions then turned to urinary


catheters, widely acknowledged to be one of


associated


the leading causes infection. At


of present,


healthcare- these


devices are made of silicone or latex, but these materials have to be impregnated with silver, iron, antibiotics or other agents to stop them from becoming riddled with bacteria. “The current crop of catheters are based on materials chosen flexibility


and resistance to


for their chemical


degradation,” says Prof Alexander, “but we


believe that the way in which the material responds to bacterial attachment should be the highest priority.” Collaborators from MIT originally


developed a high-throughput platform for screening materials against cellular response in 2004, and since then the researchers from Nottingham have been screening materials in the hope of identifying some that can be applied in situations such as these. In September 2012, they


published a paper in Nature


Biotechnology describing a new group of polymers that were able to resist bacterial and biofilm attachment. “We are now in the process


of


licensing that class of


materials to companies in certain market sectors, but the research has really only just


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