Orthopedic infections: the challenge against antimicrobial resistance

Nowadays, antibiotic resistance is a global health threat associated with high mortality. Multidrug resistant Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria are difficult to treat with conventional antibiotics and their ability to form biofilm complicates further their eradication. During surgeries, bone fractures are at high risk of these kind of infections, hindering the successful recovery of patients. Moreover, in recent years the complexity of identifying new effective antibiotic molecules hampers the treatment of these infections. For this reason, antibiotic resistance is under the surveillance of the World Health Organization.

​

The development of alternative promising molecules, known as antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), to face this phenomenon is the main goal of the “AMPROject” – AntiMicrobial Peptides-enriched silk fibroin scaffolds: a new strategy to boost the efficacy of conventional antibiotics in antimicrobial Resistance Orthopedic infections – funded by Fondazione Regionale per la Ricerca Biomedica (Regione Lombardia).

​

The project intends to design and produce AMPs via chemical synthesis and recombinant expression and to define their antimicrobial effects, in order to identify molecules with the highest antibacterial broad-spectrum activity against bacteria commonly responsible for orthopedic infections. The final goal of the “AMPROject” is the use of these promising AMPs candidates to develop bio-scaffolds, based on silk fibroin (SF), to be applied during orthopedic surgeries. In this way bone healing will be enhanced while targeted antimicrobial molecules will be delivered to prevent or treat bacterial bone infections.