With the help of quantum technologies, scientists have managed to increase the effectiveness of antibiotics many times over, which will help doctors cope with the most important problem of the 21st century - bacterial resistance to drugs.
Quantum dots are the smallest fragments of conductors or semiconductors whose charge carriers (i.e. electrons) are limited in space in all three dimensions. In this case, the size of such a particle must be so small that the quantum effects are at least somewhat significant. Scientists use them instead of dyes in various experiments related to photoelectronics to track the pathways of movement of drugs and other molecules in the body. It turned out that this does not exhaust the potential of quantum dots: researchers have found new applications for them, and, apparently, this will be a major step in the fight against drug-resistant pathogens and the infections they cause.
Antibiotics and Quantum Technologies: Scientific Synthesis
In a new study, antibiotics equipped with an experimental version of quantum dots have shown themselves to be 1000 (!) Times more effective in fighting bacteria than their "regular" versions. The dot width is equivalent to a DNA strand, which is only 3 nm in diameter. They were made from cadmium telluride, a stable crystalline compound often used in photovoltaics. The electrons in quantum dots react to green light of a certain frequency, which causes them to bind to oxygen molecules in the body and form superoxide. The bacteria that absorb it cannot resist antibiotics - after such a "lunch" their internal chemistry is completely disrupted.
The team of scientists mixed different numbers of quantum dots with different concentrations of each of the five antibiotics to create a wide range of samples for testing. They then added these samples to five strains of drug-resistant bacteria, including the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA. In 480 tests with various combinations of quantum dots, antibiotics, and bacteria, over 75% of the quantum dot samples were able to inhibit bacterial growth and even completely kill bacteria with lower doses of antibiotics.
Antibiotic resistance: the scourge of the 21st century
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According to the World Health Organization (WHO), antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest threats to food security, health and development in the world. It can affect anyone in any country: infections that were easy to treat in the past (such as gonorrhea, pneumonia and tuberculosis) become increasingly resistant to antibiotics over the years and are therefore increasingly difficult to cope with. In addition to the obvious health risks and even higher mortality rates, antibiotic resistance has an impact on the economy: it drives up medical costs and increases the length of hospital stay. And although the development of resilience is a natural evolutionary process, people manage to aggravate it even more. For example, the misuse and frequent use of antibiotics in humans,and in animals it sharply accelerates this process.
In the United States alone, at least 2,000,000 people each year suffer from increased antibiotic resistance. If this does not change, antibiotic resistance will kill more than 10 million people by 2050! Therefore, researchers around the world are working to influence this trend in a variety of ways. Some use CRISPR to directly attack bacterial agents, while others look for ways to fight off fungal infections. Scientists are even trying to cope with the very mechanism of the emergence of resistance and deprive bacteria of their main advantage.
Conclusion
Of course, the use of quantum dots is also fraught with difficulties. One of them is light, which activates the process: it should not only have a source, but also the radiation itself shines through only through a few millimeters of flesh. Therefore, at the moment, the use of quantum therapy is truly effective only for solving superficial problems. Nevertheless, this problem can be circumvented in a very elegant way: the team is already working on creating nanoparticles that react to infrared light - it passes through the whole body and can be used to treat even infections, the foci of which lie deep in soft and bone tissues.
Vasily Makarov
