Vidcast:  https://www.instagram.com/p/C17HHpkLtht/

Indwelling Foley-type urinary catheters that are placed in the bladder are unfortunately, a 2 lane highway: urine flows out but bacteria flow into the bladder triggering infections.  CalTech bioengineers have now employed artificial intelligence-powered design tools to create a catheter that prevents the inward bacterial flow.  Since the self-propelled bacteria creep up the tube walls, the optimal anti-bacterial catheter tubing turns out to have tiny downward pointing spikes that impede that migration.  Using a test population of nasty E. Coli bacteria, the researchers demonstrated that their novel catheter tubing was up to 100-fold more effective at suppressing upward bacterial flow in the catheter while urine flows out.  And all this without the need for bacterial-resistance generating antibiotics. This catheter tubing should be commercialized pronto.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adj1741

#urinary #catheters #bacteria #antibiotics #ai #bioengineering #caltech