Recently, the Jianjun Dai/Yanmin Ju team of our university published a paper entitled A Tailored Artificial Biocatalyst for Bacterial Endophthalmitis Therapy via Enhanced Ferroptosis- in Advanced Science, a leading journal in the discipline. Like Death. Caixia Sun, a PhD student of the College of Pharmacy (Class of 2021), was the first author of the paper, Prof. Jianjun Dai and Associate Researcher Yanmin Ju were the corresponding authors, and China Pharmaceutical University (CPU) was the sole correspondent of the paper.
Bacterial endophthalmitis is a class of ophthalmic acute and critical diseases caused by bacterial infections such as staphylococci, and due to the rapid progression of the disease, patients will permanently lose their visual function if they do not receive timely and effective treatment. Empirical injection of vancomycin is currently the clinically preferred treatment measure, but carries the risk of inducing bacterial resistance and retinal damage. Although nanomedicine-based antibiotic replacement therapies are currently well regarded in the treatment of bacterial infectious diseases and have achieved encouraging results, the unique disease characteristics of bacterial endophthalmitis make them largely inapplicable to the treatment of this type of disease. First, the acute and rapid onset of the disease requires not only prompt treatment, but also a rapid onset and high efficacy of therapeutic agents. Secondly, the structure of the eye is special, and because photoreceptors and other retinal cells in the eye are hyper-sensitive to external stimuli, there is a risk of retinal damage with high administration doses. In addition, high-frequency intravitreal injections increase the risk of intraocular infection. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop a novel antimicrobial strategy that is efficient and suitable for the treatment of bacterial endophthalmitis.
To address this challenge, the team proposed a biotargeted catalytic strategy based on a bacteria-specific artificial biocatalyst (MFBH) for the treatment of bacterial endophthalmitis. The results showed that MFBH exhibited efficient peptidoglycan-targeted catalytic antimicrobial activity against both standard and clinically isolated S. aureus strains. Notably, the in vivo results showed that MFBH was comparable to vancomycin in terms of therapeutic efficacy and did not cause retinal damage. Mechanistic analysis showed that MFBH induced enhanced iron-like death-like bacterial killing by accelerating reactive oxygen species (ROS) bursts. Further studies showed that ROS production is closely related to exposure to sulfur vacancies and Mo4+ on the surface of artificial biocatalysts. Taken together, this bacteria-specific artificial biocatalyst provides a promising strategy for the treatment of endophthalmitis.
This research work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 32172855) and the Special Funds for the Fundamental Research Operating Costs of the Central Universities (Project No. 2632024ZD07 and 2632024TD02).
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Full text link: https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202504601
