Managing, detecting or engineering in-vivo biofilms and the penetration of active species

Managing, detecting or engineering in-vivo biofilms and the penetration of activespecies

Our Partners, the University of Nottingham, University of Warwick and National Physical Laboratory (NPL), are seeking companies with an interest in managing, detecting or engineering in-vivo biofilms. Particularly those who would benefit from characterizing them at a molecular level or tracking the progress of a target molecule using models of the lung and skin infection. This is with a view to developing a POC for the NBIC Call but other contacts are welcome.

The Problem

The understanding of in-vivo biofilms is currently sketchy. The complexity of these environments that comprise bacteria in close proximity with host cells is becoming more challenging to study as it emerges that they are often polymicrobial. Both the biodiversity and the spatial structure of in-vivo biofilms can be hard to mimic using in-vitro models. The recalcitrance to antimicrobial therapies of these biofilms, generates challenging clinical scenarios that need to be unpicked to develop novel applications to solve them.

Investigators need to use in-vivo-like biofilm platforms to determine:

• what barriers antimicrobials encounter during penetration of in-vivo biofilms;
• the proportion and distribution of antimicrobial susceptible bacteria present;
• the metabolic response of the bacteria (e.g. do they die?) and host cells (e.g. is wound healing impeded?) to the antimicrobials;
• and the temporal distribution of signalling/virulence factors that the bacteria produce to enable the most efficient targets of novel antimicrobial strategies to be discovered.

A Proposed Solution

The University of Nottingham, the University of Warwick and NPL have access to:

• (i) State-of-the-art Orbi-SIMS (NPL), this is the only way to look at the interactions between extracellular molecules in 3D. It allows label free chemical imaging with high spatial (<2