Bio-Inspired Bimetallic Enzyme Mimics as Bio-Orthogonal Catalysts for Enhanced Bacterial Capture and Inhibition

Bacterial infections present a major threat to global health every year. The antibiotic treatment can easily lead to multidrug resistance. Despite great efforts devoted to improving the activity of the existing antibiotics or developing new antibiotics, the innate ability of bacteria to develop resistance has exceeded the rate of development of new antibiotics, which indicates that strategies to develop long-term antimicrobial therapies are ultimately doomed to fail. Therefore, it is very important to develop new ways to fight bacteria. Inspired by recent advances on nanotechnology and in vivo bio-orthogonal chemistry, here we design and synthesize biomimetic sea urchin-like PdCu nanoparticles for antibacterial therapy. The multibranched structure of PdCu-Urchin shows excellent bacteria adhesion ability. Due to the peroxidase mimetic activity and click catalysis activity of PdCu-Urchin, it possesses excellent antibacterial ability in the presence of H2O2 and precursor molecules. Together, the increased interactions between PdCu-Urchin and bacteria ensure that the active molecules and high-toxicity reactive oxygen species (ROS) can effectively act on the bacteria in situ after capturing bacteria. Both in vitro and in vivo antibacterial experiments show that our design has great potential in solving the problem of the limited ROS transmission distance in antibacterial therapy and decreasing overuse of antibiotics to avoid drug resistance. This work provides new insights for antibacterial therapy by integrating nanotopology and synergistic bio-orthogonal in vivo drug synthesis.