What are clinical biofilms

Biofilms are densely grown microbiological communities that are often embedded in a self-produced extracellular matrix, populating on abiotic surfaces such as implanted medical devices or biotic surfaces such as the mucosal layers of the lung or the vagina, or grown as small clusters of microbial cells. These entities are the culprit of many recurrent infections, particularly those related to medical implants. Biofilms are well-known to be antimicrobial resistant (AMR), showing a significantly reduced susceptibility to most first-line antimicrobial agents. Although biofilms have been a “hot” topic for almost three decades and have been intensively studied in vitro, there is a lack of strategies that can effectively prevent or treat biofilm-related infections. This is possibly due to discrepancies between clinical biofilms encountered in patients and in vitro biofilms cultured under optimized laboratory conditions.

Monash Biofilms and Medical Device Infection SIG has gained comprehensive understanding of the development, migration and recurrence of pathogenic biofilms at the tissue-device interface. Our goal is to develop better approaches to mitigate medical device-related infections and other biofilm-related recurrent infections.