Rui Luo, Dongyi Xian, Feng Li, Guiling Zhou, Ling Jiang, Jieyi Wu, Liming Lin, Yuwei Zheng, Guanyu Liu, Qian Xu, Xin Pan, Chuanbin Wu, Tingting Peng, Guilan Quan, Chao Lu
The development of antibiotic-loaded microneedles has been hindered for years by limited excipient options, restricted drug-loading space, poor microneedle formability, and short-term drug retention. Therefore, this study proposes a dissolving microneedle fabricated from the host-defense peptide ε-poly-l-lysine (EPL) as an antibacterial adjuvant system for delivering antibiotics. EPL serves not only as a major matrix material for the microneedle tips, but also as a broad-spectrum antibacterial agent that facilitates the intracellular accumulation of the antibiotic doxycycline (DOX) by increasing bacterial cell membrane permeability...
April 4, 2024: International Journal of Biological Macromolecules