Recent Advances in the Development of Antimicrobial Nanoparticles for Combating Resistant Pathogens

Abstract

The rapid growth of harmful pathogens and their multidrug-resistance poses a severe challenge for health professionals and for the development of new healthcare products. Various strategies are exploited for the development of effective antimicrobial agents, and nanoparticles are a particularly promising class of materials in this respect. This review summarizes recent advances in antimicrobial metallic, polymeric, and lipid-based nanoparticles such as liposomes, solid lipid nanoparticles, and nanostructured lipid carriers. The latter materials in particular are engineered for antimicrobial agent delivery and act by encapsulation, receptor-based binding, and disruption of microbial adherence to cellular substrates. Potential strategies for the design of multifunctional antimicrobial nanocarriers, combining material chemistry and biological interface science, are also discussed.

Drug delivery systems designed to overcome antimicrobial resistance

“…Recently, NPs have gained lots of therapeutic interest in combatting drug‐resistant bacteria and biofilm infections . Besides their inherent antimicrobial properties, NPs may be engineered to deliver or sustain the release of antimicrobial drugs at the site of infection . The main advantages of NPs are their small and modifiable sizes, their high ratio of surface area to mass, their functionalizable structures, their adaptability to both hydrophobic and hydrophilic drug molecules, their high stability in physiological liquids, and their therapeutic site‐specific targeting .…”

“…The NP‐based drug delivery systems, including metal‐based NPs (eg, silver and gold) and polymer‐based NPs (eg, dendrimers, polymeric and lipid‐based NPs), have been reported to enhance the bioavailability and therapeutic effectiveness of antimicrobials. Conjugation with NP systems also helps drug molecules to escape from biological degradation, specifically targetting microbial pathogens while minimizing undesirable side effects . The applications of antimicrobial nanocarriers were detailed in several recent reviews, herein we aim to give a brief overview of several prevalent NP‐based delivery systems in anti‐infective therapy, followed by some representative examples from the literature (cf.…”

“…Metallic NPs, such as silver and gold, have showed not only potential inherent antimicrobial properties, but also promising potential as carriers of antimicrobials . Brown et al constructed silver (AgNP) and gold (AuNP) spherical particles, and then functionalized these two metallic NPs with the β‐lactam antibiotic ampicillin ( 103 ) to investigate whether this conjugation could re‐establish the efficacy of ( 103 ) against resistant bacteria.…”

“…In recent years, polymeric NPs have emerged as potential new antimicrobials to counter the resistance of pathogenic micro‐organisms . In fact, this type of NPs not only possess inherent anti‐infective properties, but also serve as antimicrobial drug carriers . The latter is due to unique characteristics that polymeric NPs display, such as: their structural stability, allowing for them to be synthesized with a shaper size distribution; their particle properties (eg, size, zeta potentials, and drug release profiles) that can be readily tuned by changing the length of polymers, surfactants and solvents through synthesis; and their surface containing functional groups that can be chemically modified with either antimicrobial moieties or pathogen‐targeting ligands .…”

“…They are spherical vesicles composed of a bilayer membrane structure consisting of amphiphilic phospholipids . Liposomes have been increasingly investigated as carriers of antimicrobials to overcome the resistance of micro‐organisms . Omri et al incorporated polymyxin B ( 108 ) into liposomes composed of 1,2‐dipalmitoyl‐ sn ‐glycero‐3‐phosphocholine (DPPC) and cholesterol (Chol) (2:1) .…”