New research creates bioactive glasses that kill bacteria 100 times better

By modifying the composition, a team of researchers has created a bioactive glass that is remarkably effective at killing disease-causing bacteria.

Currently, antibacterial materials such as bioactive glass have many applications such as medical implants, hospital surfaces, and wound management. Scientists from Aston University in the UK report that they have increased the bacteria-killing effect of this glass by 100 times.

A research team member prototypes the objective. (Image: Aston University)

Typically, bioactive glass integrates nanoparticles of a special antibacterial metal oxide. Therefore, we can assume that if two oxides are used, the efficiency will be doubled. However, a research team led by Professor Richard Martin has found that depending on how the two metal oxides are combined, the finished bioactive glass can be much more effective than glass with a single oxide applied.

Martin and his colleagues created bioactive glass specimens containing zinc, copper, or cobalt, along with specimens that combine the two metal oxides in different ways. Each specimen is ground into a powder, disinfected, and then added to the bacterial population of Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus as well as the culture medium of the pathogenic Candida abicans fungus.

After 24 hours, glasses combined with zinc or cobalt killed E. coli bacteria 100 times better than glasses containing only one oxide. Zinc-coupled glasses were similarly effective in eradicating S. aureus. On the other hand, glasses manufactured with zinc and cobalt kill the best fungi.

"We are very excited to conduct our experiments and find that a much more effective infection-stopping product can help reduce the number of antibiotics. We are confident that the combination of antibacterial metal oxides will have a lot of benefits. potential applications," said Martin. He and his colleagues describe their findings in the journal ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering.