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Courtesy Christopher Loose
Christopher Loose, 27
Beating up bacteria
SteriCoat
Problem: Each year, a million Americans suffer infections related to medical devices such as the intravenous lines that deliver chemotherapy and liquid nutrition. Adding slow-release antibiotic coatings to the devices helps prevent such infections, but the coatings become inactive when all the drugs have been released, and bacteria can become resistant to them.
Solution: As a graduate student at MIT, Christopher Loose created a design tool to optimize formulations of naturally occurring antibiotics called antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), and developed a way to use them in medical devices. Found in bacteria, human sweat, and plants, these short proteins puncture bacteria like balloons. The mechanism is nonspecific, so microbes have trouble developing resistance to the peptides.
But AMPs are too expensive for routine oral or intravenous use. So Loose incorporated optimized peptides into coatings for medical devices, which are effective with a small amount of peptide. When bacteria approach a hip implant or catheter coated with the peptides, they "see a bed of nails," says Loose. The coating doesn't release the drugs the way typical antibacterial coatings do, so its activity is potentially permanent. Loose founded SteriCoat to commercialize the technology and is currently its chief technology officer; the company is testing coated intravenous lines in animals and hopes to bring them to market in 2011.
--Katherine Bourzac
2007 TR35 Winners
J. Christopher Anderson
Creating tumor-killing bacteria
Kristala Jones Prather
Reverse-engineering biology
Ali Khademhosseini
Living Legos
Christopher Loose
Beating up bacteria
Neil Renninger
Hacking microbes for energy
Shetal Shah
Cushioning preemies
Abraham Stroock
Microfluidic biomaterials
Doris Tsao
Shedding light on how our brains recognize faces
Lili Yang
Engineering immunity
Mehmet Yanik
Stopping light on microchips