Fighting against antimicrobial resistance will be key.
Dinesh Subedi, research fellow at Monash University, determines how to do so.
Dr. Dinesh Subedi is a microbiologist and Postdoctoral Researcher at Monash University in Australia. He studies how viruses that infect bacteria, called bacteriophages or “phages,” can be used to treat serious hospital-acquired infections.
Institutional Phage Cocktails to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance
Antibiotic resistance is a growing threat to public health.
When bacteria evolve into superbugs, even our strongest antibiotics stop working.
One group of bacteria, Enterobacter, is a serious concern in hospitals.
These infections are hard to treat and were linked to over 200,000 deaths worldwide in 2019. They spread easily in healthcare settings and resist many last-line antibiotics.
But there’s hope in bacteriophages—or simply phages—which are natural viruses that attack and kill bacteria. They’re safe to humans.
The challenge is that each phage is highly specific, so finding the right one for a patient can take time. The time many patients don’t have.
Phage therapy has also been limited by the lack of rationally designed products that address real clinical needs.
Existing premade phage products often lack clinical specificity. To overcome this, we introduced “personalisation at the hospital level.”
At The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia we collected more than 200 Enterobacter samples from infected patients over the past decade.
We used this collection to design a phage cocktail that covers the hospital’s entire pathogen profile.
We started with three phage product, adapted them to expand their range, and added two more after a targeted approach.
The final second version product, called Entelli-02, contains five phages.
It kills about 90% of local Enterobacter strains, and preclinical studies showed Entelli-02 can reduce bacterial loads by over 99%.
This is one of the first “off-the-shelf” institutional phage products built for a hospital.
And it shows that nature’s own viruses—phages—could help us win the battle against superbugs.
Read More:
[Nature Microbiology] – Rational design of a hospital-specific phage cocktail to treat Enterobacter cloacae complex infections
