Polymersomes to enhance therapeutic options for treating intracellular bacterial infections

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The risk of exposure to an infectious agent for military personnel can be high as a consequence of exposure to endemic diseases in deployment environments, as a consequence of battlefield injuries or due to exposure to a deliberate release of a biological warfare (BW) agent. A common feature of many bacterial BW agents is that they are intracellular pathogens with low infectious dose and high mortality rates. Examples include Burkholderia pseudomallei, the causative agent of melioidosis, Francisella tularensis, the causative agent of tularaemia, Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague and Coxiella burnetii, the causative agent of Q fever. Infections caused by these are inherently difficult to treat and current therapeutic options are limited and often inefficient.[1, 2, 3] Furthermore, the ever growing misuse and overuse of antibiotics had led to the accelerating emergence of multi-drug resistant bacteria and failure of existing therapeutics.[4] Consequently, there is an immediate medical need for the development of new effective treatments [5] which can be easily deployed and administered in a military setting. The aim of this project will be to investigate novel PM-based encapsulation technology to enhance bioavailability of existing therapeutics for the treatment of BW infections. Since reducing the logistical burden of antibiotic delivery is essential in a military operational context, a research focus will be the investigation and development of formulations that can be self-administered, for example by oral or inhalational routes. The project activities of this part-time PhD will be largely conducted at Dstl. The project will capitalise on access to existing PM formulation expertise at the University of Southampton and the facilities at Dstl which will allow in vitro and in vivo work to be conducted using containment level 3 (CL3) BW pathogens.