Antimicrobial Catheter

For patients undergoing long-term treatments and monitoring, such as those receiving chemotherapy, dialysis, or extensive antibiotic regimens, the insertion of a catheter into a blood vessel enables doctors to quickly and easily deliver drugs, collect blood samples and so forth without repeatedly having to stick the person with needles. But, intravascular catheters can occasionally lead to blood infections, which, in up to 25 percent of cases, are fatal. In an effort to eliminate this risk, researchers have developed a novel polyurethane coating for catheters that’s designed to slowly release an antimicrobial drug called auranofin. In tests, the coated catheters (right) were better at preventing growth of bacteria (purple and green) compared with normal catheters (left) when kept under the same conditions. While further tests for safety and efficacy are needed, the results offer hope that these essential and widely-used clinical tools can be applied with less fear of infection.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image adapted from work by Hanyang Liu, Shashank Shukla and Noel Vera-González, and colleagues
• Center for Biomedical Engineering, School of Engineering, Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, February 2019