Implantable Medical Devices for Local Drug Delivery and Tissue Regeneration to Combat Chronic Bacterial Infection

Local drug delivery has been an area of exceptional interest in the treatment of chronic bacterial infections, particularly in areas where there are medical implants placed. Medical implants are widely utilized and are becoming increasingly popular with time. With the increasing use of medical implants, concomitant bacterial infection is also increasing, and this type of bacterial infection can be exceedingly difficult to clear. The following body of work focuses on implant-associated bacterial infection, with an emphasis on chronic Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) infection, particularly osteomyelitis. Specifically, this work is focused within the scope of utilizing locally implantable medical devices with dual platform capabilities to deliver drugs and, when applicable, regenerate tissues that are lost due to injury, device placement or resulting from treatment regimen. This work provides a thorough background in local drug delivery devices that are significant in the treatment of osteomyelitis, a comprehensive review of animal models to advance research of bacterial osteomyelitis, a critical review and proposed experimental design to improve data interpretation from in vitro drug elution experiments, describes the use of a commercially available collagen matrix as a local drug delivery device with emphasis on tissue integration, and lastly, describes the in vitro and in vivo investigation of S. aureus sequence type 398 as a pathogen of osteomyelitis.