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When Kevin Braeckmans and Tom Coenye first teamed up in 2009 to devise new ways to treat badly infected wounds, it seemed like a natural pairing. Braeckmans was a drug delivery expert with no microbiology experience, while Coenye was a microbiologist lacking drug delivery expertise. These two researchers, both at Ghent University in Belgium, aspired to outfox biofilms—cooperative clusters of bacteria that infect 90 percent of chronic wounds and stymie many antibiotics due to their sticky, tightly packed nature.
The standard therapy for biofilm-afflicted wounds is to scrape away infected tissue before the infection becomes lethal. But after four years of working on an alternative to this painful and sometimes ineffective approach, Braeckmans and Coenye were stuck. They had learned how the electrical charges and molecular sizes of antibiotic compounds affected the drugs’ movements through biofilms. And with that information, they had managed to get antibiotics ...
