ABSTRACT
Any microorganisms killing molecules have some cytotoxicity more or less. The effective way of reducing cytotoxicity mainly included two approaches: One was reducing the concentration of antiseptic, while this would lead to the decreased antimicrobial efficiency; the other way was choosing suitable antiseptics and then combining of them, which can balance the disinfection and cytotoxicity. In this paper, hydroxypropyltrimethyl ammonium chloride chitosan (HACC), a cationic natural macromolecular, as the first antiseptic, incorporated with polyhexamethylene biguanide (PHMB), a smaller molecular weight cationic antiseptic polymer, as the second antiseptic, their disinfection effect and cell cytotoxicity in borate buffer solution were investigated at fairly low contents. When HACC/PHMB weight ratios were 100/1 and 150/1, the disinfection solutions produced >1-log reductions against C. albicans and >3-log reductions against S. aureus and P. aeruginosa. HACC/PHMB disinfection solution at weight ratio of 150/1 even showed a highest antimicrobial efficiency and the cell proliferation rates were approximately 100% in MTT assays. Meanwhile, the research of micromorphology and fluorescence spectra indicated that bigger aggregation state of HACC-PHMB were helpful to improve antimicrobial ability. These results showed that the HACC-PHMB combination might be a promising candidate for novel antimicrobial group for biomedical applications.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundations of China (81571812), a project funded by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (1107047002) and Hydron contact lens co., LTD (8507040152).