Nanoparticles could be used to detect deadly microbes
Researchers from Monash University have revealed how nanoparticles could be used to identify the presence of invasive and sometimes deadly microbes, as well as to deliver targeted treatments more effectively. Their work has been published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
Candida albicans, a commonly found microbe, can turn deadly when it colonises on devices such as catheters implanted in the human body. While commonly found in healthy people, the microbe can become a serious problem for those who are seriously ill or immune-suppressed. It forms a biofilm when it colonises using, for example, a catheter as a source of infection, then spreads into the bloodstream to infect internal organs.
“The mortality rate in some patient populations can be as high as 30–40% even if you treat people,” said Professor Ana Traven, from the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI). “When it colonises, it’s highly resistant to antifungal treatments.
“The idea is that if you can diagnose this infection early, then you can have a much bigger chance of treating it successfully with current antifungal drugs and stopping a full-blown systemic infection, but our current diagnostic methods are lacking. A biosensor to detect early stages of colonisation would be highly beneficial.”
Prof Traven and her colleagues investigated the effects of organosilica nanoparticles of different sizes, concentrations and surface coatings to see whether and how they interacted with both C. albicans and with immune cells in the blood. They found that the nanoparticles bound to fungal cells, but were non-toxic to them.
“They don’t kill the microbe, but we can make an antifungal particle by binding them to a known antifungal drug,” Prof Traven said.
The researchers also demonstrated that the particles associate with neutrophils — human white blood cells — in a similar way as they did with C. albicans, remaining noncytotoxic towards them.
“We’ve identified that these nanoparticles, and by inference a number of different types of nanoparticles, can be made to be interactive with cells of interest,” said Dr Simon Corrie, from Monash’s Department of Chemical Engineering.
“We can actually change the surface properties by attaching different things; thereby we can really change the interactions they have with these cells. That’s quite significant.”
Dr Corrie said while nanoparticles were being investigated in the treatment of cancer, the use of nanoparticle-based technologies in infectious diseases lags behind the cancer nanomedicine field, despite the great potential for new treatments and diagnostics.
“The other unique thing in this study is that rather than using cells grown in culture, we’re also looking at how particles act in whole human blood and with neutrophils extracted from fresh human blood,” he said.
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