Molecular design, structures, and activity of antimicrobial peptide-mimetic polymers

There is an urgent need for new antibiotics which are effective against drug-resistant bacteria without contributing to resistance development. We have designed and developed antimicrobial copolymers with cationic amphiphilic structures based on the mimicry of naturally occurring antimicrobial peptides. These copolymers exhibit potent antimicrobial activity against a broad spectrum of bacteria including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus with no adverse hemolytic activity. Notably, these polymers also did not result in any measurable resistance development in E. coli. The peptide-mimetic design principle offers significant flexibility and diversity in the creation of new antimicrobial materials and their potential biomedical applications. Antimicrobial peptide-mimetic copolymers with cationic amphiphilic structures exhibit a broad spectrum of activity without resulting in resistance development. The ease and cost-effective preparation of these synthetic copolymers combined with a variety of molecular building blocks presents tremendous opportunities for the development of new, tunable, highly effective antimicrobial materials toward biomedical applications.