Otitis - Ear infection

[waltky]

Sometimes possum gets the itchy ear...

Antibiotic Gel Designed to Treat Ear Infections
September 14, 2016 - Otitis media, or ear infection, is as common in kids as scraped knees, but it's a lot more difficult to treat, usually requiring a long course of antibiotics.

Daniel Kohane, a doctor at Boston Children’s Hospital, compared force-feeding antibiotics to children to full-contact wrestling. So, working at the Laboratory for Biomaterials and Drug Delivery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he developed an antibiotic-infused gel to treat and cure ear infections with a single application. Kohane said a clinician can squirt the gel into the child’s ear during a single visit to the doctor. The gel forms a hardened plug, and the active ingredients are able to pass through the tympanic membrane, or eardrum, to treat the infection where it is needed.

Diagram of the ear​

Kohane said skeptical scientific researchers never thought it was possible to get the antibiotic past the eardrum. But the gel contains chemical permeation enhancers, compounds that have already received regulatory approval for other uses. Known as CPEs, they are structurally similar to lipids or fat molecules in the stratum corneum, the eardrum’s outermost layer. The CPEs insert themselves into the membrane, opening up molecular pores that allow the antibiotics to seep through.

Kohane said the ear gel causes fewer side effects than antibiotics. “I previously spoke about the convenience that this gives the parents," he told VOA, "but the other thing to understand is that current therapy is an oral regimen of 10 days. So when you take a drug orally, the drug has to go throughout the body to treat a really small piece of real estate inside the head. The entire body gets exposed to antibiotic, and this leads to a number of side effects, like diarrhea, rashes and things like that.”

Antibiotic resistance