Wow... The more you look at this, the more potential you see revealed. There is the potential for several billions of dollars in revenue from medical device coatings, surgical prep, and wound dressings; not to mention OTC antibiotic creams and sprays.
The capability to mixed into things like PVC opens up the possibility of having water pipes that "treat" your water as it flows to and thru your house. This could be huge...
The PolyCides are water soluble and heat stable to approximately 200°C. They can also be incorporated into materials by injection molding, extrusion, or solvent melt-casting processes. Capable of being mixed into a variety of materials—including PVC, polyurethane, silicone, PLGA, styrene, polysulfone, and polyester—the antimicrobials can either be incorporated into the substrate of the device structure itself or applied as a coating in a PVC, polyurethane, or similar carrier. “As long as the surface is accessible to the PolyCide polymer, the material can exert its antimicrobial activity,” Landekic says.
Besides having different structures and mechanisms, silver-based antimicrobial agents and the PolyCide materials differ in several other respects. For example, while silver compounds require approximately 24 hours to kill bacteria, the PolyCides can accomplish this task in less than one minute, Landekic states. He adds that while silver acts poorly on biofilms, the PolyCides act rapidly in both disrupting existing biofilms and in preventing the formation of new ones. And while silver compounds must leach into the bacterial cell, the PolyCides act on the cell surface. Finally, silver ions exhibit cytotoxicity that accumulates in body tissue. In contrast, the PolyCides are highly selective toward bacterial versus human cells, according to Landekic. “Many types of medical devices—such as surgical sutures, catheters, intravenous tubing, implantable joints, bandages, and wound dressings—could benefit from our antimicrobial material,” Landekic says. Like host-defense proteins, which have developed resistance to bacteria over hundreds of millions of years, the PolyCides offer broad resistance against bacteria, as evidenced by 18 sets of serial passage experiments and single-point mutation assays. Landekic concludes, “PolyMedix has thus learned from nature to mimic one of the oldest and most effective immune system defenses against bacterial infection.” - slcimmuno
