{"doi":"10.1002/adhm.202301764","title":"Membrane‐Active Metallopolymers: Repurposing and Rehabilitating Antibiotics to Gram‐Negative Superbugs","abstract":"Among multiple approaches to combating antimicrobial resistance, a combination therapy of existing antibiotics with bacterial membrane-perturbing agents is promising. A viable platform of metallopolymers as adjuvants in combination with traditional antibiotics is reported in this work to combat both planktonic and stationary cells of Gram-negative superbugs and their biofilms. Antibacterial efficacy, toxicity, antibiofilm activity, bacterial resistance propensity, and mechanisms of action of metallopolymer-antibiotic combinations are investigated. These metallopolymers exhibit 4-16-fold potentiation of antibiotics against Gram-negative bacteria with negligible toxicity toward mammalian cells. More importantly, the lead combinations (polymer-ceftazidime and polymer-rifampicin) eradicate preformed biofilms of MDR E. coli and P. aeruginosa, respectively. Further, β-lactamase inhibition, outer membrane permeabilization, and membrane depolarization demonstrate synergy of these adjuvants with different antibiotics. Moreover, the membrane-active metallopolymers enable the antibiotics to circumvent bacterial resistance development. Altogether, the results indicate that such non-antibiotic adjuvants bear the promise to revitalize the efficacy of existing antibiotics to tackle Gram-negative bacterial infections.","journal":"Advanced Healthcare Materials","year":2023,"id":332888,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":24,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.947,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1059566,"name":"Swagatam Barman","orcid":"0009-0007-7277-8945","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":261770,"name":"Ruixuan Gao","orcid":"0000-0001-7137-2512","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":495557,"name":"Xiaoming Yang","orcid":"0000-0002-0410-1699","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1059567,"name":"Andrea O’Malley","orcid":"0000-0003-0584-677X","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":259020,"name":"Prakash Nagarkatti","orcid":"0000-0003-2663-0759","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":259019,"name":"Mitzi Nagarkatti","orcid":"0000-0002-5977-5615","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":334366,"name":"M. Chruszcz","orcid":"0000-0001-7521-5485","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":546723,"name":"Chuanbing Tang","orcid":"0000-0002-0242-8241","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":901582,"name":"JiHyeon Hwang","orcid":"0000-0001-5782-7496","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":70,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:09:35.125543Z","pmid":"37565371","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}