Modified Bacteriophage to Kill Multidrug Resistant Bacteria
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Date
2018-04-13
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faculty of Basic Medical Science - Libyan International Medical University
Abstract
Phage therapy is an important alternative to antibiotics in the current era of multidrug
resistant pathogens. Scientists have engineered bacteriophages, to use CRISPR (Clustered
Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), which is the gene-editing system to kill
specific bacteria. These viruses infect only specific species or strains of bacteria, so they have
less of an impact on the human body’s normal flora than antibiotics do.
Description
Throughout much of the twentieth century, antibiotics have been a primary defense against
bacterial disease. Unfortunately, inappropriate and excessive use of them is threatening their
efficacy, thus many of the bacterial pathogens have evolved into multidrug-resistant (MDR)
forms. It develops when bacteria mutates or acquires a resistance gene, and they’re called
“superbugs”. The rapid emergence of those superbugs is occurring worldwide.
(1) However,
there are deferent various ways to combat this crisis, and scientists are discovering new
techniques to fight superbugs, and one of them is the phage therapy. Phage therapy relies on
the use of naturally occurring bacteriophages to infect and lyse bacteria at the site of
infection. Current research on the use of phages and their lytic proteins, specifically against
multidrug-resistant bacterial infections, suggests phage therapy has the potential to be used as
either an alternative or a supplement to antibiotic treatments
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