Analysis of silver nanoparticle treatment fabrication methods leads to best practices suggestions
Analysis of silver nanoparticle treatment fabrication methods leads to best practices suggestions lead image
Surgical site infections continue to be a common way patients acquire infections in hospitals, with some estimates totaling about 300,000 annually in the United States. Silver has become a popular material for curbing microbial growth, and silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) provide a controlled delivery of silver in wound areas. New work analyzing the manufacturing of silver nanoparticle treatments looks to suggest a set of best practices for the technology.
Mann and Fisher evaluated the efficacy of numerous methods of fabricating silver nanoparticle drug delivery systems in combating E. coli. Using techniques ranging from water contact angle goniometry to gas-phase spectroscopy to compositional analysis, the authors found a wide variability in AgNP distribution among the methods. The article highlights a large disparity in how results falling short of health care standards are reported.
Surgical site infections can add a week or more to a hospital stay and contribute up to $10 billion in extra annual health care costs in the U.S. The fast-acting, broad-spectrum biocidal activity of silver acts on microbes by binding to their cell membranes and DNA.
The authors found that use of composite polymeric constructs such as encapsulating AgNPs in a polymer matrix substantially diminishes their ability to interact with bacterial cells, which is alleviated in part by plasma surface modification. The work calls for more specific language and studies that use multiple assays.
“One of the major challenges turned out to be actually replicating what was in the literature,” Fisher said. “Ultimately, it led us to the conclusion that better methods and standards for characterizing and describing the behavior of antimicrobial materials was critical for the field.”
Source: “Perspectives on antibacterial performance of silver nanoparticle-loaded three-dimensional polymeric constructs,” by Michelle N. Mann and Ellen R. Fisher, Biointerphases (2018). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1116/1.5042426 .
