Nanoparticles for Signaling in Biodiagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases

Abstract

Advances in nanoparticle-based systems constitute a promising research area with important implications for the treatment of bacterial infections, especially against multidrug resistant strains and bacterial biofilms. Nanosystems may be useful for the diagnosis and treatment of viral and fungal infections. Commercial diagnostic tests based on nanosystems are currently available. Different methodologies based on nanoparticles (NPs) have been developed to detect specific agents or to distinguish between Gram-positive and Gram-negative microorganisms. Also, biosensors based on nanoparticles have been applied in viral detection to improve available analytical techniques. Several point-of-care (POC) assays have been proposed that can offer results faster, easier and at lower cost than conventional techniques and can even be used in remote regions for viral diagnosis. Nanoparticles functionalized with specific molecules may modulate pharmacokinetic targeting recognition and increase anti-infective efficacy. Quorum sensing is a stimuli-response chemical communication process correlated with population density that bacteria use to regulate biofilm formation. Disabling it is an emerging approach for combating its pathogenicity. Natural or synthetic inhibitors may act as antibiofilm agents and be useful for treating multi-drug resistant bacteria. Nanostructured materials that interfere with signal molecules involved in biofilm growth have been developed for the control of infections associated with biofilm-associated infections.

Olax scandens Mediated Biogenic Synthesis of Ag-Cu Nanocomposites: Potential Against Inhibition of Drug-Resistant Microbes

“…Metallic nanoparticles have found diversified applications in the area of electronics, food, and, most profoundly, several biomedical-related fields, especially for their antimicrobial potential and also for their use as a diagnostic tool (Klebowski et al, 2018;Kumar et al, 2018;Azharuddin et al, 2019;Moutsiopoulou et al, 2019). The nano-sized metal-based particles have also been considered as promising tools for targeted drug delivery (Patra et al, 2018), imaging (Chen et al, 2018), sensors (Colino et al, 2018), synthetic inhibitors (Ma et al, 2018), etc. Nanomaterials have strikingly unique physicochemical properties (Ahmed et al, 2017), such as large surface area to mass ratio, ultra-small size, and high reactivity, which impart unusual mechanical (Guo et al, 2013), optical (Jackson and Halas, 2001), electrical, and chemical properties to as-formed particles.…”

Nanoparticle-Based Devices in the Control of Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria

“…One could argue that the last decade has witnessed a rise in nanomedicine, with many kinds of NPs being investigated and applied into the clinics, but the nanodrugs that have been approved for their clinical use, or that are actually being investigated in clinical trials are mainly anti-tumoral agents, supplements, imaging contrasts and agents, drug-delivery vehicles, anesthetics (Anselmo and Mitragotri, 2019), and even as biosensors for the detection of infectious diseases (Colino and Millán, 2018), but little to no advances have been made in regards to ANPs into their clinical application, which reflects the importance of this window of opportunity.…”

Bare Iron Oxide Nanoparticles: Surface Tunability for Biomedical, Sensing and Environmental Applications

“…Indeed, iron oxide nanoparticles, due to their structural peculiarities, were applied for developing novel platforms for biomedical, food safety and environmental issues, and efficient promising solutions to overcome the limits and drawbacks of currently available techniques were proposed. As examples, novel user-friendly, sensitive and cheap diagnostic assays to assist the control of microbial pathogens and food animal diseases were developed [113,114]. Furthermore, bare iron oxide nanoparticles offer the opportunity of covalently interacting with ligands, allowing the development of robust delivery tools.…”