Novel Targets for Treatment of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Biofilms - Antibiofilm Agents: From Diagnosis to Treatment and Prevention - page 257

Fig. 2 Silver sulfadiazine and tobramycin treatment of P. aeruginosa biofilms. GFP-tagged wild-
type P. aeruginosa and QS mutant biofilms were grown for 4 days in flow chambers. On the fourth
day, silver sulfadiazine (10, 5, or 1 g/mL) was added to the medium.

To assess the extent of the bacterial killing, propidium iodide was added to the media on day 5. The
representative pictures show biofilms after 24 h of silver sulfadiazine (SSD) or tobramycin
treatment (Bjarnsholt et al. 2007 )

ʼ g/mL) or tobramycin (340 ʼ

and healing of wounds (Storm-Versloot et al. 2010 ). Among burn wounds only one
trial showed fewer infections with silver nitrate when compared with a non-silver
dressing. Interestingly, three trials showed significantly more infections with SSD
than with the non-silver dressings. In non-burn wounds, most comparisons found no
significant differences in infection rates comparing SSD/silver-containing dressings
with non-silver dressings. And of most interest, only one comparison showed a
significant reduction in healing time using a silver-containing hydrofiber dressing
(Storm-Versloot et al. 2010 ).
Thus, it seems that the clinical competence of silver dressings are limited, which
could be due to the widespread presence of biofilms that requires unreachable
concentrations of silver. The consequence of an infected wound is a stalled healing
process and hence a chronic wound. This is in particular true in wounds infected
with P. aeruginosa (Bjarnsholt et al. 2008 ).

7 Antibodies

Antibodies against bacterial components facilitating adhesion and accumulation on
surfaces, such as the polysaccharide intercellular adhesin (PIA) and the
accumulation-associated protein (Aap) in Staphylococcus aureus (Maira-Litran
et al. 2004 ; Sun et al. 2005 ) and Opr86 in P. aeruginosa (Tashiro et al. 2008 ),
have shown promising results in preventing biofilm formation in vitro.
A successful anti-pseudomonas strategy in CF is polyclonal IgY antibodies from
egg yolk (Kollberg et al. 2003 ; Nilsson et al. 2008 ). Yolk antibodies, which are
essentially an extract of egg yolk in water, should not

induce inflammatory