Phage Therapy -Drug resistant bacterial diseases

Phage Terapy gets revitalized

 

The century old virus treatment is on high interset on the increasing drug resistance bactereia. Reports says the rastic mutaion in bacterial genome againt the antibiotics and reserches are spending a lot of time and resource on developing new drugs each and every time to tackle the diseases.


Bacterio Phage

Now the thoughts of using the century old virus treatment- use of bacterio phages- phages are virus which infects on bacteria- to treat for bacterial diseases. bacteria — to treat infections. Phage therapy is still widely used in Russia, Georgia and Poland, but never took off elsewhere. Pages are viruses and peoples are afrid of viruses.

Now, faced with the looming spectre of antibiotic resistance, Western researchers and governments are giving phages a serious look. In March, the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases listed phage therapy as one of seven prongs in its plan to combat antibiotic resistance. And at the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) meeting in Boston last month, Grégory Resch of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland presented plans for Phagoburn: the first large, multi-centre clinical trial of phage therapy for human infections, funded by the European Commission.

Previous lack of Western interest to clinicians’ preference for treating unknown infections with broad-spectrum antibiotics that kill many types of bacterium. Phages, by contrast, kill just one species or strain. But researchers now realize that they need more precise ways to target pathogenic bacteria, says microbiologist Michael Schmidt of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. Along with the rising tide of strains resistant to last-resort antibiotics, there is growing appreciation that wiping out the human body’s beneficial microbes along with disease-causing ones can create a niche in which antibiotic-resistant bacteria can thrive. “Antibiotics are a big hammer,” Schmidt says. “You want a guided missile.”

Finding a phage for a bacterial target is relatively easy, Young says. Nature provides an almost inexhaustible supply: no two identical phages have ever been found. As a bacterium becomes resistant to one phage — by shedding the receptor on the cell surface that the virus uses to enter — the Eliava Institute researchers simply add more phages to the viral cocktails that patients receive. Kutateladze says that they update their products every eight months or so, and do not always know the exact combination of phages that make up the cocktail.

In initial trials, the researchers found that their phage could kill more than 99% of the E. coli cells that contained specific anti­biotic-resistance gene sequences, whereas it left susceptible cells alone. Giving the phage to waxworm larvae infected with resistant E. coli increased the worms’ chance of survival. The researchers are now starting to test the system in mice (human trials are a long way off).

Phge therapy never replaces antibiotics . But it definitly gives and added advantage over the drug resistance strains of bacteria.