Degradable synthetic antibacterial copolymers for therapeutic applications – COPOTIC

Bacterial resistance to antibiotics has become a major public health issue. Indeed, mainly because of the overconsumption and/or misuse of antibiotics, many strains of bacteria have become resistant or even multi-resistant to current
antibiotics.
Moreover, very few new antibiotics are proposed each year on the market and those that are are mainly used to fight against a given strain of bacteria.

It is therefore urgent to find alternatives to antibiotics.


Several avenues have been or are currently being studied, such as those based on the use of bacteriophages, immune stimulation or antimicrobial peptides. However, none of them has given convincing results in phase I to III clinical trials.

Another possible alternative to antibiotics is the use of amphiphilic cationic copolymers. These synthetic copolymers have proven to have a very good antibacterial activity against Gram+, Gram- and/or multi-resistant bacteria. They are also non-toxic and have the advantage of not inducing resistance because they use a mechanism of action targeting the membrane of the bacteria causing lysis of the latter.

Numerous families of (co)polymers have been studied in recent years, such as polyacrylics, polymethacrylics, polyionenes or polymaleimides for example, but almost exclusively in vitro. An in vivo use of these copolymers requires that they are degradable. However, very few degradable antibacterial copolymers have been developed so far because of the limited choice of monomers. Among them, polycarbonates are certainly the family of degradable polymers which gave the most encouraging results during in vivo tests.

The aim of this project is to synthesize new degradable cationic antibacterial copolymers using ring-opening radical polymerization (rROP) in order to propose a new alternative to antibiotics that is also scalable to industrial scale.

Such copolymers would represent a major advance in the fight against bacterial resistance and the treatment of systemic infections.