The increasing prevalence of bacterial infections has made it necessary to find novel methods of combatting the resistance of bacteria to conventional antibiotics. Mycobacterium abscessus is an increasingly prevalent pathogen that is intrinsically drug resistant, therefore difficult to treat. The use of phytochemicals as a source of alternate antibiotics has been explored, however, the poor solubility of phytochemicals in water makes it difficult to effectively deliver them to bacterial biofilms. In this study, I investigated the efficacy of nanosponge-emulsified phytochemicals in killing M. abscessus biofilms. The nanosponge technology was used to improve the solubility and stability of the phytochemicals, allowing for improved bioavailability. Results showed that the nanosponge-emulsified phytochemicals effectively reduced the viability of M. abscessus biofilms, compared to non-emulsified phytochemicals. The findings of this study contribute to a development of new strategies for the treatment of bacterial infections and demonstrate the potential of nanosponge-emulsified phytochemicals as a promising alternative to conventional antibiotics.

La méthode à privilégier pour améliorer dans les zéolithes la diffusion des réactifs, des intermédiaires réactionnels et des produits est de raccourcir la longueur du chemin diffusionnel, c'est-à-dire de diminuer la taille des cristaux. La croissance des cristallites est fonction de la composition du gel de synthèse, du temps de cristallisation, de la température, etc. La maîtrise de cette croissance permet d'obtenir un large éventail de taille pouvant aller de plusieurs micromètres à seulement quelques dizaines de nanomètres. Dorénavant, il est possible de limiter le chemin diffusionnel à seulement 3 mailles élémentaires en inhibant lors de la synthèse hydrothermale la croissance des cristaux dans une direction privilégiée. Pour cela l'utilisation d'agent structurant organique très particulier de type géminé s'avère indispensable et donne dans le cas de la zéolithe de type *BEA un matériau hiérarchisé avec des cristaux zéolithiques de 4 nm d'épaisseur séparés par des mésopores structurés et réguliers. La morphologie de ce matériau ressemble à une éponge de mer.<br>Deux réactions modèles, hydroisomérisation du n-héxadécane et transformation de l'éthanol en hydrocarbures, démontrent que la diffusion des réactifs et des produits sont optimisées dans les nanoéponges de bêta. La stabilité et la sélectivité du catalyseur se trouvent alors améliorées au détriment, étonnamment, de l'activité. Cela vient du fait que l'extrême diminution de l'épaisseur des cristallites conduit à une augmentation du nombre d'aluminium en bouche de pores qui sont, bien que très accessibles, incapables de catalyser les réactions d'isomérisation et de craquage. Les aluminium proche de la surface externe, contrairement à ceux situés au cœur du cristal ne bénéficient pas des effets longues distances ce qui les rend moins forts. / The method to ameliorate the diffusion of reactants, reaction intermediates, and products inside the zeolite is by shortening the diffusion path length, i.e., crystals size. The growth of the crystals is a function of gel composition synthesis, crystallization time, temperature, etc. The mastering of this growth allows to obtain a wide range of the size which ranges from several micrometers to a few tens of nanometers. It is possible now to limit the diffusion path to only three unit cells by inhibiting the crystals' growth in one direction during the hydrothermal synthesis. For that, the use of a peculiar organic surfactant geminate is indispensable, it gives a hierarchical material with zeolitic crystals of 4 nm thickness separated by structured and regular mesopores in the case of *BEA type zeolite. The morphology of this material resembles a sea sponge.<br>Two reaction models, n-hexadecane hydroisomerization and ethanol transformation to hydrocarbons, demonstrate that the reactants and the products diffusion was optimized in the beta nanosponges. Surprisingly the catalyst stability and selectivity were improved instead of activity. In fact this is due to the extreme reducing of the zeolite crystals’ thickness that leads to increase the aluminum number in the pore mouth, which although very accessible, but incapable to catalyze the isomerization and cracking reactions. The aluminums near the external surface, in contrary to those in the crystal heart, do not benefit from the long distance effects, which makes them weaker.

This study aims at tackling some of the problems often encountered in photostability testing and liquid formulation development. Three anti-cancer drugs will be employed as models; Dacarbazine (DBZ) has well established photostability issues, Axitinib (AXI) and Sunitinib (SUT) are two new drugs only commercially available in solid dosage forms. In ethanol, the photokinetics of these drugs were well described by the newly proposed Φ-order kinetic mathematical model. This has confirmed the photoreversible character of AXI and SUT’s and unimolecular photoreaction of DBZ’s photodegradations. Also, the Φ-order kinetics is proven to describe them better than the usually used classic thermal reaction orders. In aqueous solution, the drugs were found to undergo thermal and photochemical complex degradations, involving at least 3 photoproducts. A new photokinetic approach has been proposed in this work to solving and unravelling the attributes of such complex mechanisms. For the first time, the quantum yields (QY) of the three drugs were determined and found to increase with irradiation wavelength. SUT’s QY were comparable in ethanol and water (QY460 = 0.02), DBZ was found to be more photoefficient in water (QY330 = 0.04 and 0.1, respectively) and AXI in water (QY330 = 0.06 and 0.03). Φ-order kinetics’ potential for the development of reliable actinometers of the three drugs, without prior knowledge of unknown reaction parameters, has also been established. A general equation to describe the isotherm of a (Gn:Hm) guest-host multicomponent complex was proposed in this work to palliate the lack of a strategy for characterising nanosponge-drug complexes. It provides information on both stiochiometry and association constant of the complex. The results indicate that hydrophobic AXI forms a 1:0.8 complex, indicating the possibility of multiple association sites and/or different types of binding. The newly developed AXI/nanosponge liquid formulation has significantly increased solubility (5000-fold) and thermal stability. Furthermore, the photostability of DBZ and SUT were considerably improved by using a strategy based on light-absorption competitors. Their initial velocities reduced from 10 and 3 s-1 (respectively) to 1 and 0.13 s-1. The successful application of these methods to the model anti-cancer drugs has set out new approaches that might be found useful for future treatments of photodegradation data, development of drug-actinometers and liquid formulations of drugs.