Bacterial infections pose a tremendous challenge to global health, causing a wide range of illnesses from minor skin infections to life-threatening conditions like pneumonia, meningitis and sepsis. Biofilms in which infecting pathogens reside, represent structured bacterial communities that provide bacteria enhanced protection against antimicrobial agents and host immune defenses.
Apart from the enhanced protection of the bacterial biofilm-mode of growth, increasing antibiotic resistance amongst bacterial pathogens hampers effective antibiotic treatment. The rate at which bacterial resistance increases, surpasses the speed of new antibiotic discovery and development, making once-treatable infections increasingly difficult to manage and control.
Therefore, new infection control strategies are required that operate on a non-antibiotic basis. Dispersants provide a non-antibiotic based strategy that breaks down the biofilm fortress. However, by dispersing a biofilm, the bacteria within the fortress become planktonic i.e. freely suspended in the blood circulation which make them more susceptible to clearance by the host immune system, than bacteria in a biofilm. Nevertheless, the suddenly high concentration of dispersed bacteria in blood can lead to life-threatening complications, like sepsis.
Therefore, in this thesis of Renfei Wu new strategies for dispersing infectious biofilms and modulating the immune response to enhance the natural clearance of dispersed bacteria from the blood circulation, without relying on antibiotics has been developed.
