Modified Bacteriophage to Kill Multidrug Resistant Bacteria
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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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.
