Progress of polymer-based strategies in fungal disease management: Designed for different roles

Abstract

Fungal diseases have posed a great challenge to global health, but have fewer solutions compared to bacterial and viral infections. Development and application of new treatment modalities for fungi are limited by their inherent essential properties as eukaryotes. The microorganism identification and drug sensitivity analyze are limited by their proliferation rates. Moreover, there are currently no vaccines for prevention. Polymer science and related interdisciplinary technologies have revolutionized the field of fungal disease management. To date, numerous advanced polymer-based systems have been developed for management of fungal diseases, including prevention, diagnosis, treatment and monitoring. In this review, we provide an overview of current needs and advances in polymer-based strategies against fungal diseases. We high light various treatment modalities. Delivery systems of antifungal drugs, systems based on polymers’ innate antifungal activities, and photodynamic therapies each follow their own mechanisms and unique design clues. We also discuss various prevention strategies including immunization and antifungal medical devices, and further describe point-of-care testing platforms as futuristic diagnostic and monitoring tools. The broad application of polymer-based strategies for both public and personal health management is prospected and integrated systems have become a promising direction. However, there is a gap between experimental studies and clinical translation. In future, well-designed in vivo trials should be conducted to reveal the underlying mechanisms and explore the efficacy as well as biosafety of polymer-based products.

Mimicking Charged Host-Defense Peptides to Tune the Antifungal Activity and Biocompatibility of Amphiphilic Polymers

“…To circumvent the aforementioned issues with antifungal peptides, controlled polymerization techniques have been used to prepare synthetic macromolecules that mimic the overall properties of antifungal peptides. − As controlled polymerization techniques are highly tolerant to different functional groups, they are especially well suited to mimic antifungal peptides, which contain a mixture of various charged and uncharged amino acids with defined chain lengths. , Zhang and co-workers showed that the combination of a positively charged ammonium group and hydrophobic groups in a synthetic polymer increased antifungal activity compared to the respective homopolymers . Additional work has demonstrated that the incorporation of an uncharged functional group, such as hydroxyl groups, into amphiphilic polymers decreased the hemolytic activity and protein aggregation, in turn increasing bioavailability in antibacterial studies. , Recently, our group studied the influence of the hydrophobicity and molecular weight of ternary, amphiphilic polyacrylamides on their antifungal activity and biocompatibility .…”