REVIEW article
Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
Sec. Biomaterials
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2025.1671151
This article is part of the Research TopicBiomaterials, 3D printing technologies, and perspectives for bone and cartilage regenerationView all 4 articles
Nanomaterial-Mediated Antibiotic Delivery: A Novel Strategy for Osteomyelitis Therapy
Provisionally accepted
- 1Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, China
- 2Wuxi Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Wuxi, China
- 3Shanghai Minhang Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine, shanghai, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Osteomyelitis is an inflammatory bone disease caused by bacterial infection, often leading to bone destruction and functional impairment. Traditional treatments face significant limitations, including substantial surgical trauma, low drug delivery efficiency, and a high risk of recurrence. Nanomaterial-mediated antibiotic delivery has emerged as an innovative strategy, enabling localized, targeted and controlled antibiotic release. Representative platforms include nanohydroxyapatite (nHA), mesoporous bioactive glass (MBG), poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA), metal – organic frameworks (MOFs), silver nanoparticles (AgNPs), and multifunctional hybrid composites. This approach can enhance therapeutic efficacy, reduces systemic side effects, and promotes bone regeneration. This review summarizes the pathogenesis and therapeutic challenges of osteomyelitis, explores the construction and delivery mechanisms of nanocarriers, and discusses recent advances from in vitro studies to animal models and clinical research. Current evidence indicates that nanocarrier-based drug delivery systems can effectively inhibit bacterial growth, modulate inflammatory responses, and facilitate bone regeneration. However, their large-scale clinical application remains limited by concerns regarding safety, manufacturing complexity, regulatory standardization, and cost. Future directions include the development of intelligent nanocarriers, integration with multimodal therapeutic strategies (e.g., photothermal, immunomodulatory, and stem cell-assisted therapies), establishment of standardized multi-tier toxicity evaluation frameworks, and progression toward large-animal validation and early phase clinical trials, which are expected to drive further progress and provide more effective and safer treatment options for osteomyelitis.
Keywords: Osteomyelitis, nanomaterials, antibiotic delivery, targeted therapy, Bone Regeneration
Received: 22 Jul 2025; Accepted: 15 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Cheng, Meng, Li, Zhang and Han. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Ya-Feng Zhang, wxzy007@njucm.edu.cn
Hai-Hui Han, hanhaihui@hotmail.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.