In Colorado, researchers at Colorado State University are trying to fight superbugs, those nasty, deadly, stubborn bacteria that traditional antibiotics can’t kill, with what sounds like a super hero’s cocktail drink – copper, shrimp shells and insect wings. The new material that fights villain superbug (dare we say it’s name) Pseudomonas aeruginosa, helps prevent the nasty bacteria biofilm from forming in about 85 percent of their lab testing.
What exactly is in this super hero cocktail? The biomaterial is made from a copper metal-organic framework mixed with chitosan, which is derived from insect wings and shrimp shells. As reported in NUU last October, researchers in Portugal were using chitosan from shellfish shells for bone regeneration and bone grafting, making chitosan a much more useful medical material than ever imagined.