Creation and Evaluation of New Porcine Model for Investigation of Treatments of Surgical Site Infection

Surgical site infection (SSI) is the most common cause of surgical failure, increasing the risks of postoperative mortality and morbidity. Recently, it has been reported that the use of antimicrobial dressings at the incision site help with prevention of SSI. Despite the increased body of research on the development of different types of antimicrobial dressings for this application, to our knowledge, nobody has reported a reliable large animal model to evaluate the efficacy of developed materials in a preclinical SSI model. In this study, we developed a porcine full-thickness incision model to investigate SSI caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the leading cause of SSI in the United States. Using this model, we then evaluated the efficacy of our newly developed silver releasing nanofibrous dressings for preventing and inhibiting MRSA infection. Our results confirmed the ease and practicality of a new porcine model as an in vivo platform for evaluation of biomaterials for SSI. Using this model, we found that our silver releasing scaffolds significantly reduced bacterial growth in wounds inoculated with MRSA relative to nontreated controls and to wounds treated with the gold standard, silver sulfadiazine, without causing inflammation at the wound site. Findings from this study confirm the potential of our silver-releasing nanofibrous scaffolds for treatment/prevention of SSI, and introduce a new porcine model for in vivo evaluation of additional SSI treatment approaches.