Case studies of infection associated with soft-tissue biomaterials

Peter Taub, MD
Mount Sinai Hospital
New York, NY

Peter J. Taub, MD, MS, FACS, FAAP, was born and raised in New York City. He graduated from Brown University (1989) and the Albert Einstein School of Medicine (1993) with national Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA) honors and distinction for research in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. He completed an internship and General Surgery residency at The Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York (1999). During that time, Dr. Taub spent a year in the Microvascular Research Laboratory and served as the Teaching Resident for the third-year medical students. He went on to complete a second residency in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles and stayed for an additional year of training in Craniofacial Surgery under the direction of Dr. Henry K. Kawamoto, Jr., MD, DDS.

Dr. Taub is board certified in both General Surgery (2001) and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (2003). He is a Fellow of both the American College of Surgeons (FACS) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (FAAP). He is active in many national professional societies and Past-President of the Plastic Surgery Research Council (PSRC), the American Society of Maxillofacial Surgery (ASMS), the American Association of Pediatric Plastic Surgeons, the Northeastern Society of Plastic Surgeons (NESPS), and the New York Regional Society of Plastic Surgeons (NYRSPS). He is also active in the American Society of Plastic Surgery (ASPS), the American Cleft Palate Craniofacial Association (ACPA).

Biofilms in Bone Tumor Patients: Quantitative Science Chasing Clinical Imperatives

Nicolas Bernthal
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Dr. Nicholas Bernthal is the Chief of the Division of Musculoskeletal Oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He graduated magna cum laude and phi beta kappa from Princeton University and received alpha omega alpha honors from Cornell University Medical School. He did his residency at UCLA in orthopaedic surgery and did fellowships in orthopaedic research and musculoskeletal oncology at UCLA and the Huntsman Cancer Institute, respectively. His clinical interests are bone and soft tissue tumors and his NIH-funded laboratory is pioneering new implant coatings to prevent surgical infections. He has developed a novel preclinical mouse model of orthopaedic implant infection that uses real-time in vivo bioluminescent imaging to quantify bacterial burden and host immune response. This has served as an important tool to study novel therapeutics, prophylactic agents, and host protective immunity. His laboratory has also contributed to the understanding of the host immune response to surgical site infections as well to understanding and describing the long-term outcomes on oncologic treatments, both medical and surgical, for osteosarcoma.

To touch or not to touch: The mechanism of antibacterial contact transfer

Shikha Nangia, [1*] and Jingjing Ji [1]
Department of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY, USA

*Corresponding Author: [email protected]

Treating device-associated infection is challenging because multispecies pathogens colonize the device surface and resist traditional antimicrobial treatments. Moreover, the drug delivery efficacy is severely limited at these target sites due to compromised vascularity and poor perfusion leading to subtherapeutic drug concentrations. An alternative strategy is to design antimicrobial-impregnated drug delivery biomaterial coatings for implantable devices to provide early on-site treatment of the infection-causing pathogens before they colonize the device surface. Using advances in computational modeling, we focus on designing antimicrobial-loaded microgels optimized to release therapeutic upon bacterial contact. In the absence of bacteria, the antimicrobial remains sequestered in the microgel. In collaboration with the Libera group (Stevens Institute of Technology), our group has focused on the triggered release of cationic antimicrobials from polyanionic microgels. In recent publications, [1], [2] our groups examined the various factors (ion concentration, microgel structure, drug concentration) influencing the antibiotic (colistin and polymyxin B) complexation and release from polyacrylic acid and polystyrene sulfonate microgels upon contact with Escherichia coli. The simulation results are in excellent agreement with the experimental data. Building on these foundational data, we are designing a new class of biocompatible antimicrobial microgels based on the triggered-release mechanism—to touch or not to touch—for antibacterial contact transfer.

[1]. Self-Defensive Antimicrobial Surfaces Using Polymyxin-Loaded Poly(styrene sulfonate) Microgels, X. Xiao, J. Ji, W. Zhao, H. Wang, S. Nangia, H. Wang, M. Libera, ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, 8, 4827–4837 (2022).

[2]. Salt Destabilization of Cationic Colistin Complexation within Polyanionic Microgels, X. Xiao, J. Ji, W. Zhao, S. Nangia, M. Libera, Macromolecules, 55, 1736-1746 (2022).