Resistances to antibiotics are increasingly presenting medical professionals with challenges. A recently developed therapeutic approach counteracts the problem of resistance – researchers make use of viruses.
Doctors often have to prescribe a certain antibiotic for their patients, for example in the case of cystitis – and cannot know whether this is even effective against the pathogen. Determining the specific pathogen would take several days.
Researchers at ZETH Zurich and Balgrist University Hospital have now developed a kind of rapid test to identify the pathogen in question. This makes use of so-called bacteriophages, i.e. viruses that only infect certain bacteria. The viruses were genetically modified to efficiently combat the corresponding bacteria, as the researchers show using the example of a urinary tract infection in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
Viruses produce light signals when they come into contact with bacteria
The advantage of bacteriophages is that, unlike antibiotics, they only attack a specific target bacterium. The bacteria act as a host for the bacteriophage.
For the newly developed rapid test, researchers have adapted the phages in such a way that the infected urinary tract infection host bacteria trigger a signal in the form of light when they come into contact with the phages. This means that the bacteria in question can be determined immediately using a urine sample.
The therapy can then be carried out with the help of a suitable antibiotic, but also with suitable phages.
combination of phages and antibiotics makes sense
In particular, the combination of phages and antibiotics could bring great advantages: although bacteria quickly developed resistance to phages, it would be difficult for bacteria to develop resistance to both antibiotics and phages at the same time.
So if the bacteria are exposed to a very high phage pressure, resistance to the phages will build up. This in turn enables antibiotic therapy without the development of resistance to them.
Phages could partially replace antibiotics
Another advantage of phages is their good tolerability: “We ingest billions of phages every day without any relevant side effects,” reports Mathias W. Pletz, Director of the Institute for Infectious Medicine and Hospital Hygiene at Jena University Hospital Daily News.
However, phages must be precisely adapted to the pathogen bacteria. Alexander Harms, Assistant Professor of Molecular Phage Biology at the Technical University of Zurich, sees a solution to this problem in “pre-packaged phage cocktails”: These could be used for common and non-life-threatening infections, thereby supplementing the use of antibiotics or partially completely could be replaced.
The drug can only be used in five to ten years
So far, drugs containing phage preparations have not yet been approved in the EU. Researchers at the Technical University of Zurich and the Balgrist University Hospital now want to carry out a clinical study. With the help of this study, it can be decided over the next five to ten years to what extent phage therapies can be used in the future, as Samuel Kilcher, co-author of the study, reports to SWR.
Source used: Nature Communications, Tagesschau, SWR
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