Drug Delivery and Translational Research - Featured Article: January 2024
Read the featured article from the January 2024 issue! (this opens in a new tab)
Local administration of in-situ forming hydrogel incorporating antibiotics directly to the site of infection or its close vicinity could reduce the emergence of resistant bacterial strains and avoid side effects compared to systemic treatments. In this study, we introduce combined hydrogel/nanoparticle systems composed of an in-situ forming chitosan composite hydrogel and biodegradable nanoparticle loaded with linezolid, which exhibit a pseudoplastics flow to promote injectability and enable frequent injections. The optimum formulae sustained the release of linezolid for 7–10 days, which reveals its ability to reduce the frequency of injection during the course of treatment of bones infections and increase the patients’ compliance. They succeeded in alleviating the bone infections and the associated clinical, biochemical, radiological, and histopathological changes within 2–4 weeks of injection. As to the state of art in this study and to the best of our knowledge, no such complete and systematic study on this type of combined in situ forming hydrogel loaded with spray-dried nanoparticles of linezolid is available yet in literatures.