By Michelle Pflumm

Scummy surface layers known as biofilms can coat everything from teeth to pacemakers. In addition to the yuck factor, these slimy fortresses offer a menacing safe haven for deadly bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus. Michelle Pflumm reports on new vaccines that aim to prevent microbes from building biofilms in the first place.

Mark Shirtliff never intended to be a vaccinologist. What he wanted to do when he went to graduate school at the University of Texas in Galveston was to help people suffering from bone infections, a condition known as osteomyelitis that can arise after procedures to fix a break or repair a joint. This diseased bone tissue must be surgically removed, so as part of his doctoral work, he developed an experimental bone-stabilizing cement to fill in the gaps of leg bones of rabbits that had undergone such a procedure. But the cement ended up doing more harm than good. The animals started to limp and lose weight just days after surgery.

Eventually, he discovered that the surface of the cement was the ideal meeting ground for Staphylococcus aureus, the microbe infamous for causing fatal hospital-acquired infections. These clever bacteria adhered onto the gluey acrylic substances and formed gunky layers of protein and sugar called biofilms to dodge the concurrently administered antibiotics. Try as he might, Shirtliff couldn’t break the cycle of recurrent bone infections.

“It annoyed the hell out of me that you couldn’t cure a biofilm infection,” he recalls.

(Click here to continue reading.)

Image: CDC/ Rodney M. Donlan, Ph.D.; Janice Carr