Chapter 2 - Strategies of surface engineering/modifications for reversing antibiotic resistance

Abstract

Use of antibiotics to treat, prevent, or improve infectious diseases is one of the most effective clinical approaches for treating of bacterial infections. But misuse or abuse of antibiotics causes antimicrobial resistance (AMR) which turned into one of the critical public health concerns worldwide. AMR occurs when germs are not killed using antibiotics and develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them and instead continue to grow. Accelerated growth of AMR compared with the low speed of the discovery of new antibiotics requires new infection control approaches and therefore, there is a critical need for developing novel strategies to reverse AMR. In this regard, nanomaterials-based antibacterials revealed a great potential as one of the novel strategies for next-generation of defenses against AMR and proliferation of multidrug resistant. In this chapter we introduce various mechanisms of AMR and discuss novel approaches to enhance the therapeutic efficacy of antibiotics to prevent drug resistance using modified nanomaterials and engineered nanostructures. We will then discuss the various mechanisms of engineered nanomaterials to combat AR and reviving of the antibacterial activities of conventional antibiotics by different mechanisms, including optimizing pharmacokinetics, improving antibiotic internalization, interfering bacterial metabolism, enhancing biofilm penetration, changing biofilm microenvironments, etc.