Localised antibiotic delivery and release with luminescent mesoporous silica nanoparticles

抗菌素耐药性是对全球公共卫生和经济发展最具挑战性的威胁之一，据估计，到2050年，每年将导致额外1000万人死亡，全球经济损失高达100万亿美元。除了有限的药物外，由于AMR(内在或后天)机制，目前更多的抗生素化合物正在变得不那么有效。革兰氏阴性菌(例如铜绿假单胞菌或大肠杆菌)是最难治疗的病原体之一，因为它们的膜结构使它们对许多抗生素相对不能渗透。因此，为了增加抗生素在这类细胞中的摄取，在本项目中，我们将开发纳米颗粒来提高抗生素传递的本地化效率。二氧化硅基纳米多孔材料具有较高的孔容&0.9cm3/g和较大的比表面积(&gt；900m2/g)，是很好的候选材料。我们将使用不同的功能化路线来检查抗生素释放的效率、表面的影响和靶向载体来检查细菌细胞的摄取。我们将使用发光金属络合物将发光信号引入纳米粒子，以监测细胞摄取和跟踪抗菌剂的释放。

Antibacterial resistance (AMR) of one of the most challenging threats to global public health and economic development estimated to cause an additional 10 million deaths per year and a loss of up to US$100 trillion from the global economy by 2050. Besides the limited drugs in the pipeline, more current antibiotic compounds are becoming less effective due to AMR (intrinsic or acquired) mechanisms. Gram-negative bacteria (eg. P. aeruginosa or E. coli) are one of the most difficult class of pathogens to treat because their membrane structure makes them relatively impermeable to many antibiotics. Thus, in order to increase the antibiotic uptake in such cells, in this project we will develop nanoparticles to increase the efficiency of antibiotic delivery localisation. Silica based nanoporous materials are good candidates with high pore volume > 0.9 cm3/g and large surface area (> 900 m2/g). We will be using different functionalisation routes to examine the efficiency of antibiotic release, effect of the surface and the targeting vectors to examine uptake by bacterial cells. We will use luminescent metal complexes to introduce luminescent signal to nanoparticles to monitor cell uptake and tracking of antibacterial agent release.