COVER STORY
ARJUN LUTHRA, COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR, BIOINTERACTIONS, DISCUSSES AN ENHANCED MULTI-ACTION BIOCOMPATIBLE COATING IS ENHANCING BIOCOMPATIBILITY AND ANTIMICROBIAL PROTECTION ON MEDICAL DEVICES FOR EXTENSIVE PERIODS OF TIME.
Killing germs inside you, on you & around you
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he case for revolutionary technologies and solutions that greatly enhance the standards of our health services plays a significant role in our quality of living. This has never been more important than now. Innovations which protect and enhance the standard routines used by healthcare services are in constant demand and are especially critical considering the global Covid-19 pandemic. As the pandemic has persisted, our healthcare services and innovative technologies battle to keep up with the viral evolutions as well as mitigate impact to core areas of healthcare services. This highlights the importance and the necessity for preventative technologies to be used at global scale to effectively prevent infections, reduce antibiotic resistance, and enhance healthcare infrastructure. The prevention measures and standards must focus on efficacy against a broad spectrum of pathogens equal to medical device requirements, durable protection to minimise costs of implementation and safe variations which are biocompatible to allow for large scale application.
Materials play a critical role in improving the performance of the technology and can improve the implementation and application into a range of environments and industries. The antimicrobial efficacy of materials involves critical interactions between the pathogen and surface interface. The successes of applications are dependent on a variety of biological events occurring at this interface and these events intensify the complications of procedures. This must be all addressed during innovation and development. The challenge of infection prevention will help us move toward long-term prevention mechanisms and enhanced medical devices as well as industrial & consumer products. The biological events which occur at the pathogensurface interface is critical to improving the prevention technology against pathogens. Biological responses are complex processes which are governed by a variety of factors. These factors range from surface properties to protein interactions which includes the chemistry, topography, wettability, as well as the composition of a surface and the biological entities present at the interface Infection and pathogens on surfaces have been long studied as it is a significant challenge which has impeded improvement of long-term medical devices & a range of industrial applications. A variety of techniques including silver, copper, chlorhexidine, and other leaching chemistries used on medical devices have not proven to be significantly effective and highlight the need for an innovative solution. It has been seen in a randomized study of surface treatments to prevent infections that silver surface treatments have failed to reduce infection rates. It has also been seen that the use of silver-impregnated collagen cuffs can impede catheter fixation due to the killing of fibroblasts and cause the catheter to dislodge. Therefore, highlighting the limits and toxic impacts of similar leaching chemistries to silver technology on eukaryotic cells. Furthermore, it has been recommended that any catheter which has caused bacteremia should be immediately removed and only replaced once results of blood cultures normalised. This highlights the difficulty previous technologies experience when combating infections safely on a surface over long periods of time. These approaches have had limited success, whilst additionally requiring the consistent use of antibiotics, leading to resistance and further complications. The biological events which occur on a surface are a complex result of interactions between the surface and the proteins and cells which are present at the pathogen-surface interface. These complex challenges require a multi-action material which considers all these varying factors in one straightforward technology. Multi-action materials provide a highperformance surface which are the most effective at preventing pathogen growth, as well as the longest durability, all whilst improving safety to the patient in one straight-forward solution.
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