The Promise of Biofilm Research

Biofilms are assemblages of microorganisms that grow associated with a surface and often they are composed of many different species. They are the sorts of things you would find in a toilet bowl, it’s what you would be brushing off your teeth in the morning and evening. We see biofilms attached to surfaces of rocks, so there are groups of microorganisms that are living in close contact with one another usually imbedded in what we would call a slime matrix. So biofilm bacteria are very, they are exquisitely resistant to treatment of anti-microbiosides, whether they are biocides or antibiotics. One of our principle interests in this lab is biofilms, is the treatment of biofilms in a medical context. And so we are concerned about biofilms that cause chronic diseases in humans and there are numerous examples. For instance, in this comes the answer I think to another question you have, prostatitis, perhaps some intestinal diseases such as Crohn’s disease and inflammatory bowel disease, sinusitis, otitis, conjunctivitis, even arthrosclerosis, which is hardening of the arteries, is believed to be induced by bacterial growth as a biofilm inside blood vessels. And so all these chronic ailments are ones that we don’t find treatable, and people actually go on throughout their lives just assuming that this is the human condition and not thinking often that they may be suffering from an infection.