Microbiological evaluation of experimental wounds in sheep treated with natural latex biomembrane with and without gentamicin and its relation to healing

• Grant number: 19/13653-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: September 01, 2019
• End date: August 31, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Agronomical Sciences - Veterinary Medicine - Animal Pathology
• Principal Investigator: Breno Fernando Martins de Almeida
• Grantee: Giovanna Gati de Souza
• Host Institution: Centro Universitário Faculdades Integradas de Ourinhos. Fundação Educacional Miguel Mofarrej. Ourinhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Antibiotic therapy aims to reduce or eliminate the number of microorganisms present in the wound. The development of a new drug delivery system is essential in promoting therapeutic actions, and new technologies are needed to reduce the limitations of existing therapies. Latex is a biomaterial that has the property of accelerating angiogenesis and increasing cicatrizant activity, and gentamicin can be incorporated into this biopolymer. In this context, the present project aims to evaluate if the treatment of experimentally induced wounds in sheep using latex biomembrane with and without gentamicin is able to improve healing and reduce the bacterial load of these wounds, in addition to correlating the bacterial load to the cicatrization. For this, 10 sheep will receive three wounds in the left hemithorax and three wounds in the right hemithorax. The wounds will be left open for 24 hours to promote contamination and will receive treatment with latex biomembrane, latex biomembrane with gentamicin or, as a control, will not receive any coverage, and the treatments will be randomly distributed. The wounds will be cleaned and the biomembranes changed every three days, during which time the morphometric evaluation of the wounds will be performed to follow the healing process. In addition, the total bacterial load of the wounds per microbiological culture will be evaluated weekly and at three different times, the sensitivity of the bacteria present in the wounds to different antimicrobials and to the biomembranes themselves will be tested. Thereafter, healing will be correlated to bacterial load. The differences between the groups will be verified by the ANOVA test with repeated measurements with Tukey or Friedman post-test with Dunn post-test, and the correlations will be performed by the Pearson or Spearman coefficients after normality analysis (Shapiro test -Wilk), being considered significant when p <0.05.