Using a few zaps of electricity to the skin, researchers can stop bacterial infections without using any drugs. For the first time, researchers designed a skin patch that uses imperceptible electric currents to control microbes. The results appear October 24 in the Cell Press journal Device .
"This opens up exciting possibilities for drug-free treatments, especially for skin infections and wound healing, where antibiotic-resistant bacteria pose a serious challenge," says University of Chicago's Bozhi Tian, one of the paper's co-senior authors. Scientists have already been using electricity to manipulate mammalian cells, including those of humans, and to treat diseases without using medicine. For example, pacemakers can regulate heartbeats by stimulating heart muscles with small electric currents.
Retina prosthesis, a type of bionic eye, also uses electricity to stimulate a patient's retina to partially restore their vision. Tian and his team wondered if they could manipulate bacteria using electricity instead of antibiotics, a traditional approach that gave rise to the global antibiotic resistance crisis. Due to antibiotic overuse in humans and livestock, many microbes have evolved and become resistant to current drugs, rendering them less effective over time.
Previous studies estimate that drug-resistant infections might have contributed to about 1.27 million deaths worldwide in 2019. The team set out to test if Staphylococcus epidermidis , a common bacterium on human skin, .
