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DR. THOMAS J. WEBSTER, Ph.D.:
I'll make a little bit of a transition
to talking, now, more
about medical devices.
So how can we use
nanomedicine to keep bacteria
from growing on medical devices?
And I mentioned this
earlier that this
is a huge problem because
infection of implants
are actually increasing,
not decreasing.
And, again, this is because our
approach to kill bacteria to date
has been to develop
pharmaceuticals or antibiotics.
And these antibiotics are
killing the bacteria initially,
but eventually the bacteria develop
a resistance to these antibiotics.
So we think in nanomedicine
that this approach is flawed.
And we really cannot keep on
developing new antibiotics to kill
bacteria because they
are going to constantly
mutate and develop a resistance to
the antibiotics that we develop.
We think nanomaterials, or
nanomedicine, has a huge promise
for killing bacteria,
for keeping bacteria
from attaching to a surface.
So I'm about to talk about a
particular chemistry called silicon
nitride, in which you
can basically take
the surface of a radio-opaque
material, like silicon nitride,
and create nano-scale
features on that material
to keep bacteria from attaching.
This is initially an approach
that we came up with
to promote radio-opacity.
If, again, you think about
the original argument we made
for nanomaterials,
their novelty resides
in their increased surface area.
So if you take a material
that is radio-opaque
and you increase its
surface area, you actually
will increase radio-opacity.
It'll show up much
brighter on an x-ray
simply by increasing nanoscale
features on the surface.
One question we then
asked is, that's great,
We can increase
radio-opacity, but how
do cells respond to these
increased surface area materials,
to these materials that
have nanoscale features?
