Being prepared for surgery, medical staff are required to list the risks, which may sound overwhelming and frightening to patients. One of those risks is putting a foreign object into the body, which provides the opportunity for infection to take hold. Dr. Nikolay Gerasimchuk, professor of chemistry at Missouri State University, is developing a set of compounds that could be used to properly set medical indwelling devices and prevent infections at those sites.

“What we are hunting for is to make that interface between tissue and any indwelling device antimicrobial,” he said. “Because what happens in many cases is that infection comes in place where the device is set, and we know what that means: The loss of productive lifetime, increased post-procedural rehabilitation and recovery time, pain and significant material cost needed to address the problem.”

The antimicrobial property of silver is one key to a current research project Gerasimchuk is conducting 30 years after receiving his first doctorate degree in Kiev, Ukraine. He is developing a set of compounds (cyanoximes) that, when added in a small amount to light-curable polymeric medical adhesives, could serve as a coating mixture, which is also water insoluble, light insensitive and thermally stable to withstand the rigors of medical and dental procedures. It is patent pending and not available yet.

Gerasimchuk envisions a day, though, when it will be used with pacemakers, joint replacements and in dental implants.

“The more I was doing this work, the more I realized how beautiful this group of molecules is,” he said. “I saw an opportunity to build a tinker toy, a Lego type approach, so we can keep one part of the molecule consistent and then add a huge variety of other parts to it to change compounds’ properties such as solubility, bulkiness, color, etc.”

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