School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, P. R. China.
ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2020 Sep 2;12(35):39685-39694. doi: 10.1021/acsami.0c12355. Epub 2020 Aug 21.
Diseases induced by bacterial infections increasingly threaten the health of people all over the world; thus, it is urgent and significant to early diagnose and effectively eliminate infections to save people's lives. To this end, we synthesized an intelligent hydrogel that integrated visualized diagnosis and photothermal therapy of bacterial infections. By simply and subtly incorporating pH-sensitive bromothymol blue (BTB) and near-infrared (NIR)-absorbing conjugated polymer (termed as PTDBD) into thermosensitive chitosan (CS)-based hydrogel, the synthesized BTB/PTDBD/CS hydrogel can diagnose the acidic microenvironment of () biofilm and infected wounds by showing visualized color change. After rapid diagnosis, the hydrogel can immediately treat the infection site by local hyperthermia under irradiation of NIR laser (808 nm) and even the stubborn biofilm that is difficult to eradicate. Since the dominating antibacterial mechanism is hyperthermia, the hybrid hydrogel shows broad-spectrum antibacterial activity against Gram-positive, Gram-negative, and drug-resistant bacteria. In addition, it has low cytotoxicity to normal cells and no effect on the main organs of mice. It paves a brand new avenue to develop smart and facile diagnosis and a treatment platform for bacterial infections.
细菌感染引起的疾病日益威胁着全世界人民的健康；因此，早期诊断和有效消除感染以拯救生命是紧迫和重要的。为此，我们合成了一种智能水凝胶，将细菌感染的可视化诊断和光热疗法集成在一起。通过简单巧妙地将 pH 敏感的溴百里酚蓝（BTB）和近红外（NIR）吸收共轭聚合物（称为 PTDBD）掺入到温敏壳聚糖（CS）基水凝胶中，所合成的 BTB/PTDBD/CS 水凝胶可以通过显示可视化的颜色变化来诊断生物膜和感染伤口的酸性微环境。快速诊断后，水凝胶在 808nm 近红外激光照射下可以立即通过局部热疗治疗感染部位，甚至可以治疗难以根除的顽固生物膜。由于主要的抗菌机制是热疗，该混合水凝胶对革兰氏阳性菌、革兰氏阴性菌和耐药菌表现出广谱抗菌活性。此外，它对正常细胞的细胞毒性低，对小鼠的主要器官没有影响。为开发智能简便的细菌感染诊断和治疗平台开辟了新途径。
