Until November 24, a global awareness week is dedicated to antimicrobial resistance. While this antibiotic resistance constitutes a real public health threat, let us look back at an experiment carried out in Geneva where a patient was treated with a cocktail of bacteria-killing viruses, one of the techniques that could constitute a solution against antibiotic-resistant infectious agents.
- Antibiotic resistance is the subject of an awareness week until November 24.
- The lack of effects of antibiotics on certain bacteria could be the cause of 5,000 deaths per year in France.
- One solution could come from the use of phages, bacteria-killing viruses that do not infect human cells.
More than 5,000 deaths per year in France: this is the worrying report from a study recently published in The Lancet the rise of antibiotic resistance. And on a global scale, forecasts announce terrible figures: the increase in the lack of effect of antibiotics on many bacteria could lead to the death of almost 40 million people by 2050.
Against this announced tragedy, countermeasures exist. From the simplest, such as better respect for daily hygiene measures, to the most classic, the limitation of the use of antibiotics and vaccination campaigns, even to the most innovative, the use against resistant bacteria of what is beginning to appear as a weapon of the future, bacteriophages (also more simply called “phages”), viruses present in the biosphere and which attack bacteria without infecting human cells.
A study published in 2023 in Nature Communications reports a “first” carried out by a team from the University Hospitals of Geneva (Switzerland) which made it possible to save a patient suffering from a pulmonary bacterial infection resistant to antibiotics thanks to the use of these bacteriophages.
Phage therapy against multi-resistant bacteria
The experimental treatment this patient from Geneva received allowed him to recover from an infection with a multi-resistant strain of the Pseudomonas aeruginoisa bacteria. This 41-year-old man had been hospitalized for several months and his condition showed no improvement, despite continuous intravenous antibiotic therapy.
After 5 days of treatment with phage therapy administered by aerosol while continuing antibiotics, the patient no longer had, as reported in the study, respiratory obstruction and did not experience any new exacerbations after leaving the hospital. .
Analysis of bacteria compared to a phage bank
But this technique remains complex and above all very individualized. “Bacteria can develop resistance to phages as well as to antibiotics and it was necessary to select the appropriate phage for the targeted bacterial strain.specified in a press release from the University Hospitals of Geneva Dr. Thilo Köhler from the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine. His team initially isolated the bacteria contained in the patient’s respiratory secretions to analyze their genetic profile and compare it to a phage bank, the virus active on these bacteria being finally identified at the American University of Yale.
This result “highlights the complexity of selecting the active phage or designing phage cocktails,” underlines, however, the study of Nature Communication.
