Coating Metal Bone Implants with Bacteria Promoted Healing and Reduced Infections
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956_:
Coating metal bone implants with bacteria found to promote healing while reducing infections:
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China has found that coating titanium bone implants with a thin film of Lactobacillus casei before implantation promoted healing and reduced infection risk in rats.
[...] In this new effort, the researchers wondered if coating the implant with a known antibacterial agent might reduce the chances of infection after bone surgery. To find out, they broke the tibias of test rats and then repaired them using standard bone implant techniques; in the experiment, half of the implants were first coated with a L. casei biofilm.
[...] They found that the rats that had received the coated implants had higher rates of bone growth than did those that had received uncoated implants (27% versus 16%). They then repeated the experiment but added a second coating of MRSA bacteria to the implants. They found that the L. casei biofilm prevented 99.9 percent of infections.
Journal Reference:
Lei Tan, Jieni Fu, Fan Feng, et al. Engineered probiotics biofilm enhances osseointegration via immunoregulation and anti-infection [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba5723)
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