Optimizing a novel therapy for bacterial lung infections.

What is it about?

For any medication, it is important that the drug gets to the right part of the body to perform its function. For some therapeutics, for example ointments used on the skin, this is relatively easy; yet for others, such as treating bacterial infections in the lung, this can be problematic. The focus of this study is to optimize a therapeutic for bacterial lung infection such that it can be delivered to the deep regions of lung and, equally important, maintains it antibacterial activity. The study specifically focuses on a material called pulmonary surfactant as a delivery vehicle for a molecule capable of killing a wide variety of infectious bacteria called CATH-2. The work shows that if we design the surfactant to contain specific lipids (and avoid others), it functions better as a delivery vehicle for CATH-2.

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Why is it important?

There are two important aspects to this study (in our opinion anyway): 1) with the growing incidence of infections by antibiotic resistant bacteria, studying novel therapies, such as the one we examined, are important in order to develop functional alternatives to antibiotics. 2) on a more general scale, our study is a "proof-of-principle" that investigated one antimicrobial agent with surfactant but can easily be expanded to test a variety of other antimicrobial drugs, or other pulmonary therapeutics, as well.

Perspectives