Application of Novel 3,4-Dihydroxyphenylalanine-Containing Antimicrobial Polymers for the Prevention of Uropathogen Attachment to Urinary Biomaterials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction and Objective: Urinary catheters and stents are frequently prone to catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) through biofilm formation. Several strategies have been evaluated in search of a stent coating to reliably prevent adherence of bacteria and biofilm. Previous in vivo and in vitro research with methoxylated polyethylene glycol 3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine (DOPA) copolymer as a candidate coating showed promising results to reduce the bacterial attachment. We aimed to further enhance this antimicrobial activity by adding antimicrobial agents to newly synthesized DOPA-based copolymers. Materials and Methods: Building on our previous experience, novel copolymers were engineered based on DOPA. Quaternary ammonium groups and silver particles were added by cross-linking to increase the antimicrobial activity through both kill-by-contact and planktonic killing. After coating polyurethane sheets and measuring contact angles, all candidate coatings were challenged in vitro with an Escherichia coli culture. The most promising coatings were then further evaluated against a panel of seven clinically relevant uropathogens and planktonic killing, and microbial attachment was determined. Results: Initially, seven coatings were developed, referred to as Surphys 093–099. The most significant increase in contact angle was identified in Surphys-095 and -098. Surphys coatings S-094, S-095, and S-098 were cross-linked with silver and exhibited profound antimicrobial properties when challenged with E. coli . Further testing demonstrated S-095 to have antimicrobial efficacy against gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria at different silver-loading concentrations. The final coating, consisting of a 2 mg/mL solution of S-095 cross-linked with 0.25 mg/mL AgNO 3 , appeared to be highly bactericidal showing a ≥99.9% bacterial killing effect while remaining below cytotoxicity levels. Conclusions: We were able to engineer DOPA-based copolymers and add quaternary ammonium and silver particles, thus increasing the bactericidal properties of the coating. These coatings have exhibited a biologically significant ability to prevent uropathogens from attaching to biomaterials and represent a realistic opportunity to combat CAUTI.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".