Bacterial infections usually announce themselves with pain and fever but often can be defeated with antibiotics — and then there are those that are sneaky and hard to beat. Now, scientists have built a new weapon against such pathogens in the form of tiny DNA pyramids. Published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, their study found the nanopyramids can flag bacteria and kill more of them than medicine alone.
Medicine using nanoparticles to carry a drug holds a lot of promise. But the structural carriers for the drugs can cause health problems.
While they have not used this in a human being, these researchers did say that using this DNA pyramid to carry an antibiotic substantially enhanced the killing ability of the drug.