Targeting Antibiotic Tolerant Biofilms with a Novel Antimicrobial Wound Gel

Dr. Miloslav Sailer shares key details from his poster, “A Novel Antimicrobial Wound Gel* to Target Wound Related Antibiotic Tolerant Biofilms,” presented at SAWC Fall 2023 in Las Vegas, NV.

Transcript

Miloslav Sailer, PhD:

Hello. My name is, Miloslav Sailer. I am the R&D lab manager at Kane Biotech. And me and my team of scientists have been working on a new antimicrobial wound gel that targets wound-related antibiotic-tolerant biofilms. And the contents of the poster really are to show the effect of the wound gel on antibiotic-tolerant biofilms.

Oftentimes, when people are testing these gels, in their models they are not removing the planktonic bacteria. So, if I go back a little bit, usually, these biofilms contain planktonic bacteria and biofilm bacteria. Biofilm bacteria are kind of in a phenotype that is less metabolic, so they're resistant to antibiotics and antimicrobials, and they're also encased in the biofilm matrix, which varies in the structure, varies from organism. For example, Pseudomonas has very, like, protein DNA-based biofilms, whereas S epidermis has more sugary based biofilms, so it varies. And we were testing our product, a new wound gel, on destroying these biofilms to get at those bacteria that are in their dormant phenotype.

So, we've and on top of that, we have tested in 2 different models. So, we're really developing our lab as a pig explant model. Most people in most labs are doing their tests on plastic dishes or nitrocellulose membranes, which is part of our study as well. We compared studies on nitrocellulose membranes and pig explants to see if we could break down those biofilms and kill those bacteria.

And we found that in S aureus, we found very good results in both models, the nitrocellulose colony biofilm model and the pig explant model. And, Pseudomonas, we found good results for the nitrocellulose, but in the more complicated, the explant model where the tissue is more complicated, we found some reduction, but not as much. So, we're just, it's an ongoing process here. We're continuing to test. This is kind of phase 1 of the testing. We want to share preliminary results on this poster. There's more data to be gathered and shown in the future posters.

Well, we just wanted to share our results showing that our new gel can break down these biofilms that are really resistant to antibiotics and antimicrobials. And we want to also highlight the importance of using a model that removes those planktonic bacteria because you can artificially make it seem like your product is doing very well by not removing those planktonic bacteria first. You can easily kill those macrobacteria with any micro antimicrobial, antibiotic, and show that your product is really doing, like, 3 log reduction in killing bacteria, but where, in fact, you're just killing the planktonic bacteria. You're not really killing the remaining biofilm bacteria. So, we want to kind of highlight that it's important for researchers in this field to design models that remove the planktonic bacteria and really focus on the bacteria that are embedded in the biofilm. It's not artificially enhanced their kill ratio.

So, our technology is based on chelation. So divalent ion chelation. So, these bacteria really rely on divalent ions. It's quite a remarkably simple way of dealing with the problem, is you starve the bacteria of the required divalent ions so that they need to form these biofilms to keep that 3D structure, you need these divalent ions to keep the structure in place. And without the access to those divalent ions, the bacteria just cannot maintain the structure of those of those. And furthermore, the divalent ions as well, they inhibit a lot of the processes that require the bacteria to grow internally as well. So, it's kind of has kind of an antimicrobial effect as well.

These studies are preliminary. I was shocked as to how well our product worked with S aureus and our pig explant biofilm model, because that's a very complicated model that mimics the natural wound environment of a human as close as possible. I know there's still it's not a living thing, but the tissue structures are quite similar. So, the biofilms are really embedded deep into the flesh of the pigskin explant. So, I was shocked to see how well product worked for S aureus, especially. We still have some work to do on Pseudomonas, but that it was able to penetrate deep into the flesh and really get at the bacteria that were deep into the tissues. So, that was a little bit shocking. I was expecting to see a much lower reduction in biofilm, sorry, in bacterial counts, but we had a very large reduction for, in the pig explant model, that was surprising to me.

This product, well, we are going to be testing it in a variety of different models. We are developing biofilm explant models for a variety of organisms. We're also working on developing multi-species biofilm models. So, a lot of these biofilm models right now are single species. But, in reality, you have hundreds, hence the hundreds even more different species of bacteria in the wound. And we want to at least get 2 or 3 in the models that we use so that we can predict the effect when you actually use it in patients. So one of the things we're really trying to do is using this product and also other products to compare the developed models, to better mimic clinical, you know, results that we're expecting.