Over the past many decades antibiotics have been a great treatment to combat bacteria. The use of antibiotics has saved millions of lives, and was an incredible advancement in modern medicine. As the usage of antibiotics has increased and become more common, the effectiveness of antibiotics has decreased. As antibiotics are used, the bacteria that they are meant to get rid of have a chance to evolve as a population to be resistant to that antibiotic. Due to the possibility of evolution toward a resistant bacteria, the excess use of antibiotics can be dangerous. Also incomplete doses of antibiotics allow for the most resistant population of the bacteria in a patient to survive past the treatment and reproduce. This is another reason antibiotic resistant bacteria are evolving. In recent years antibiotic resistant bacteria have become more and more prevalent.
Antibiotic resistant species of bacteria are providing a problem as they can not be cared for with the traditional antibiotic treatment. This is causing researchers to look for alternative routes of medicine to treat antibiotic resistant bacteria. One promising corner of research for a solution to this problem is in bacteriophages.
Bacteriophages essentially are viruses that infect and kill bacteria. Bacteriophages were discovered in the 1920’s by Félix d'Herelle. They were initially used in the Soviet Republic of Georgia. Bacteriophages coevolve with bacteria and are specialized to specific strains of bacteria. Bacteriophages can be an alternative to antibiotics that are becoming useless due to antibiotic resistant bacteria. With antibiotics, bacteria will evolve to be resistant to the antibiotic, and the antibiotic can not evolve. Bacteriophages will evolve with the target bacteria as they become resistant. The current antibiotic crisis cannot happen with bacteriophages because bacteriophages will change with the bacteria. Bacteriophages have a specialized strain of bacteria that they attack, so only one strain of bacteria will be eradicated. With Antibiotics, more strains of bacteria, other than the target strain, can be attacked by the drugs.
As of today, there is not an alternative to antibiotics in mainstream medicine, but bacteriophages are a promising contender for the future of antibiotic resistant bacteria treatment. At this link you can find more information on the background and clinical uses of bacteriophages. Bacteriophages may hold the key for the future of fighting antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Posted By "John Mariano" (3)
ReplyDeleteHow much specificity to a target do bacteriophages actually have? I understand that bacteriophages would not attack mammalian cells, only bacteria. Is it not possible then that bacteriophages might also attack human gut flora? This is another issue with antibiotics besides the growing problem that infective bacterial strains are becoming resistant to treatments. Of course, even if bacteriophages were to somehow attack gut flora, the pros outweigh the cons; solving the problem of increasingly resistant bacterial strains is of high importance in the medical world.
-David Frykenberg
Bacteriophages are often targeting a specific strain of bacteria. Ideally this would prevent bacteriophages from damaging the microbiome of bacteria within the patient. The rapid evolution of bacteria and bacteriophages helps force bacteriophages to be specialized to a specific strand.
DeleteMore information can be found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30060549
-John Mariano
You may want to edit your post. Your settings/ font/ size is off and your post in not readable. Sorry.
ReplyDelete-Gene
Bacteriophages as an alternative is quiet interesting. although it was used before, researchers had a hard time proving its efficacy. Have they discovered any new research?
ReplyDelete-fredjah Desmezeaux
Phage Therapy is not being used much in the western world. There is some application of bacteriophages being used in Russia. It has mostly been used as an alternative when bacterial infections are not responding well to conventional antibiotic treatments.
Delete-John Mariano
At this point in time we don't have a reliable alternative for antibiotics, but I would recommend looking into gene editing with CRISPR. This gene editing technique is getting more popular day by day. It will be the future of specialized medicine.
ReplyDelete-Joshua Gach