Phage Therapy 2023_Bacteriophages

Bacteriophage Cocktails in the Post-COVID Rehabilitation

Increasing evidence suggests that gut dysbiosis is associated with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection and may persist long after disease resolution. The excessive use of antimicrobials in patients with COVID-19 can lead to additional destruction of the microbiota, as well as to the growth and spread of antimicrobial resistance. The problem of bacterial resistance to…

Zn2+- Releasing Phage Bound to Gold Nanorods for Treating Wound Infections

Phage therapy forms a good alternative to antibiotics, but it poses serious drawbacks and safety concerns, such as the risk of genetic transduction of antibiotic resistance genes, inconsistent pharmacokinetics, and unknown evolutionary potential.  Metallic nanoparticles, in turn, possess precise, tunable properties, including efficient conversion of electronic excitation into heat. Peng et al., demonstrated that engineered…

Engineered Bacteriophages Suppress Antibiotic Resistant P. Aeuruginosa Infection

 DMS3acrIF1 mitigates tissue injury and improve survival – histological analysis   The therapeutic use of bacteriophages provides great promise for treating multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacterial infections. However, an incomplete understanding of the interactions between phages and bacteria has negatively impacted the application of phage therapy.   Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa) is an opportunistic Gram-negative bacterium that causes…

Personalized Bacteriophage Therapy Against Pandrug-Resistant Spinal Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Infection

Visualization of Plaque Forming Units (PFU) of the different phages on the patient’s strains isolated before phage therapy or during the second-stage surgery procedure. Bone and joint infections (BJI) are one of the most difficult-to-treat bacterial infection, especially in the era of antimicrobial resistance. Lytic bacteriophages are natural viruses that can selectively target and kill…

Engineering Therapeutic Phages: Towards Enhanced Antibacterial Efficacy

Despite phage therapy demonstrating success in various individual cases of antimicrobial resistance, a comprehensive and unequivocal demonstration of the therapeutic potential of phages remains to be shown. The co-evolution of phages and their bacterial hosts resulted in several inherent limitations for the use of natural phages as therapeutics such as restricted host range, moderate antibacterial…

Gut Bacteriophage Dynamics During Fecal Microbial Transplantation in Metabolic Syndrome Subjects

Metabolic Syndrome (MetS) is a growing public health concern worldwide. A healthy gut microbiota is associated with a reduction in MetS. Treatment of MetS with fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) can be effective, however, its success rate is intermediate and difficult to predict. Because bacteriophages significantly affect the microbiota membership and function, the aim of this…

Engineering T4 Bacteriophage for In-Vivo Display via Type V CRISPR-Cas Genome Editing

Bacteriophage T4 has enormous potential for biomedical applications due to its large size, capsid architecture, and high payload capability for protein and DNA delivery. However, it is not very easy to genetically engineer its genome heavily modified by cytosine hydroxymethylation and glucosylation. The glucosyl hydroxymethyl cytosine (ghmC) genome of phage is completely resistant to most…

Luminescence Modulating Phages for Detecting Disease Associated Biomarkers

Assessment of risk for a given disease and the diagnosis of diseases is often based on assays detecting biomarkers. Antibody-based biomarker-assays for diseases such as prostate cancer are often ambiguous and biomarker proteins are frequently also elevated for reasons that are unspecific. Kulpakko et al. have opted to use luminescence modulating phages for the analysis…