Smart wound dressing delivers antibiotics on-demand, accelerating healing and reducing resistance
Brown University
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Biomedical engineers from Brown University have developed a new wound dressing material that releases antibiotic drugs only when harmful bacteria are present in a wound. In a new study, the researchers show that the material could help rapidly clear wound infections to accelerate healing while reducing the unnecessary use of antibiotics — a major driver of antibiotic resistance and hard-to-treat “superbug” infections that claim tens of thousands of lives worldwide each year.
The new material is a smart hydrogel loaded with an antibiotic cargo that can be placed directly on a wound under a bandage. The hydrogel is sensitive to an enzyme produced by many different types of harmful bacteria. When the enzyme is present, the hydrogel starts to degrade, releasing the antibiotics trapped inside. But when no harmful bacteria are present, the hydrogel stays intact, safely locking its antibiotic cargo away.
“Antimicrobial resistance is a major problem worldwide, so we need better approaches for how we use antibiotics,” said Anita Shukla, a professor in Brown’s School of Engineering who led the development of the smart hydrogel. “We’ve developed a material that releases antibiotics only when harmful bacteria are present, so it limits exposure to antibiotics when they’re not needed but still provides these important medications when they are needed.”
For the study, which is published in Science Advances, the researchers put their hydrogel material to the test, showing that it is highly selective to the presence of the enzymes produced by common wound infection-causing bacteria, and that it may promote better infection clearance and wound healing compared to a hydrogel dressing commonly used in clinical settings today.
Hydrogels are Jell-O-like materials made largely of water and long, spaghetti-like polymer molecules. The polymers are held together by smaller molecules called crosslinkers, which keep the hydrogel intact. For this new material, the researchers used a crosslinker that degrades when it comes into contact with enzymes called beta-lactamases, which are produced by a wide variety of bacteria. That degradation allows the hydrogel structure to fall apart and release the antibiotic cargo inside.
In petri dish experiments, the researchers confirmed that the material only degraded when harmful, beta-lactamase-producing bacteria were present. When only harmless bacteria that do not produce beta-lactamases were present, the material stayed intact and did not lead to antibiotic resistance development over a long-term exposure to the hydrogel dressing.
That selectivity for beta-lactamases is critical, the researchers said. Confirming beta-lactamase specificity means that release of antibiotics only happens in the presence of harmful infection-causing bacteria, and exposure to the healthy skin microbiota can be greatly reduced.
The study also showed that until degradation is triggered, the material holds on tightly to its antibiotic cargo.
“This really is a very stable formulation that doesn’t allow the drug to leach out,” Shukla said. “It's truly trapped in there until there is a significant amount of beta-lactamase production that can cause hydrogel degradation.”
In a series of experiments in mice, the researchers showed that a single application of the hydrogel could fully eradicate bacterial infection in an abrasion wound. The new material also outperformed an antimicrobial dressing that’s commonly used today in both bacterial eradication and wound healing.
Taken together, the results suggest a promising new way to fight wound infections while conserving critical antibiotics. Studies suggest that more than 1 million people worldwide die each year as a result of infections that are resistant to common antibiotics. The problem is expected to get worse, nearing 10 million annual deaths associated with antimicrobial resistance by 2050, if steps are not taken to reduce antibiotic overuse.
“Our findings suggest that these bacterial enzyme-responsive smart hydrogels have the potential to provide targeted, on-demand infection eradication while minimizing unnecessary exposure to antibiotics,” the researchers conclude. “By releasing the antibiotic only in the presence of beta-lactamase-producing bacteria, our hydrogel system provides effective treatment while minimizing susceptibility to antibiotic resistance.”
The research team has patented the new material and is working toward further advancement of the technology for potential future commercialization.
The work was supported by the Dr. Ralph and Marian Falk Medical Research Trust.
Journal
Science Advances
Article Title
Bacterial Enzyme-Responsive Hydrogels for Triggered Delivery of Antibiotics to Infected Wounds
Article Publication Date
20-Mar-2026
COI Statement
Members of the research team are inventors on a pending patent related to this work filed by Brown University (nO63/384,159, filed 17 November 2022).
OCT powered by AI-based analytics gives a glimpse into wound healing
Traditional eye imaging technology powered up by new techniques and AI provides a unique in-depth look at wounds as they heal over time.
image:
A new look at how blood vessels grow and heal after a wound. The soft hydrogel-treated wounds (left) show significantly more vessels than the stiff condition (right), suggesting slower vessel remodeling in the soft group and overall slower healing compared to the stiff-treated one.
view moreCredit: Duke University
No matter the size or severity, wounds on human skin are difficult to monitor while they heal. Biopsies disrupt the wound site and are too invasive for routine, repeated monitoring, and most medical imaging devices that could do the job are large, expensive and booked up with more pressing diagnostics. Clinicians typically resort to visual inspection or quick measurements of the wound’s size over time.
Based on research completed as part of a multi-year collaboration with Nokia Bell Labs, biomedical engineers at Duke University are developing a solution. Using a custom-built optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging system together with artificial intelligence (AI) models grounded in a deep understanding of tissue regeneration, researchers have shown they can accurately and objectively measure the progress of wounds healing over time.
Using their new approach, the researchers also show that a hydrogel under development to improve wound healing works better with stiffer mechanical properties. The results are a two-for-one boon in a challenging area for both clinicians and researchers.
The research appears online March 20 in the journal Cell Biomaterials.
“Wound healing is a complex process, and what we see on the surface doesn't always reflect what’s happening underneath,” said Sharon Gerecht, chair and the Paul M. Gross Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke. “For more than a decade, my lab has developed hydrogel-based therapies to guide tissue healing and regeneration. Partnering with Nokia Bell Labs allowed us to combine advanced optical imaging and AI has given us unprecedented insights into how biomaterials induce healing beneath the surface.”
OCT is best known for its role in eye care, where it provides 3D images of the back of the eye to help diagnose and monitor retinal diseases. Now, researchers have adapted that same depth-resolved imaging capability to wound healing, using light to non-invasively visualize tissue architecture and blood flow beneath the skin.
Turning those rich scans into meaningful biological insights, however, requires more than imaging alone. Parsing through the information demands quantitative tools that can rapidly interpret large volumes of complex data. That is where the collaboration with Nokia Bell Labs proved essential.
Researchers at Nokia Bell Labs over the multi-year project, developed a custom OCT system along with AI-driven analytical methods that were trained on imaging datasets acquired in the Gerecht lab. This OCT-AI platform enabled the team to move beyond simple visualization, making it possible to automatically quantify how tissue structure and vascular dynamics evolve over time as well as objectively assess the degree of healing.
To evaluate the technology, the collaborative team applied it to wounds in mice treated with a hydrogel developed in the Gerecht lab. To demonstrate the broader research potential of this platform, they compared hydrogels with relatively soft and relatively stiff mechanical properties.
Over the course of two weeks, the platform provided a detailed inside look at how granulation tissue—the smooth, glassy tissue that initially fills a wound—filled the space and matured. The data showed that the stiffer hydrogel helped more initial granulation tissue form in less time, and it also helped the initial tissue transition to intact, regenerated tissue faster.
“With our developmental technology, we were able to monitor the blood flow near the wound and collectively understand the structural and vascular changes that were happening in real-time,” said Jiyeon Song, a postdoctoral researcher in Gerecht’s laboratory and co-first author of the paper. “The AI helped us quantitatively track those changes and get more objective results rather than us trying to manually analyze the images ourselves.”
Moving forward, the research collaboration plans to continue to develop this platform for potential clinical use. While the OCT-AI platform proved itself in this relatively simple scenario, much more work is required to move it beyond monitoring healing progress to be predictive in a variety of disease states. For example, Gerecht and her team plan to pursue funding for research aimed at building this system out so that it can predict the healing of chronic wounds in diabetic patients.
This research was supported by the P30 Cancer Center Support Grant (P30 CA014236), the American Heart Association, the Duke Regeneration Center (DRC), Duke Science and Technology (DST), and Nokia Bell Labs.
“Multimodal OCT with Deep Learning Reveals In Vivo Healing Dynamics in Hydrogel-Treated Wounds.” Jiyeon Song, Shreyas Shah, Makenzie Bushold, Michael S. Crouch, Sohini Sarkar, Nicole Hanson, Bibek R. Samanta, Ya Guan, Michael S. Eggleston, Sharon Gerecht. Cell Biomaterials, 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.celbio.2026.100422
This custom-built OCT machine with AI abilities from Nokia Bell Labs gave researchers the ability to track wound healing progress like never before.
Credit
Duke University
Journal
Cell Biomaterials
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
Animals
Article Title
Multimodal OCT with Deep Learning Reveals In Vivo Healing Dynamics in Hydrogel-Treated Wounds
Article Publication Date
20-Mar-2026
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