German startup finds way to fight antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections

20 July 2022, 20:14 | Technologies
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As pathogenic bacteria quickly learn to defend themselves against antibiotics, some scientists are turning to biological weapons to fight them: specialized viruses that kill bacteria - bacteriophages or just phages, Science writes..

Attempts to use phages in the fight against bacterial infections were made more than a century ago, but medicine abandoned them after the advent of antibiotics..

One of the reasons for the refusal: the cultivation of phages using traditional technology is an expensive, complex and potentially dangerous process, because in order to obtain a sufficient number of phages, pathogenic bacteria must first be cultivated in the laboratory.. They are then exposed to phages previously isolated from the same pathogens.. After these phages begin to multiply in bacteria, they are filtered out.

German research team suggests faster, cleaner way to produce phages. Their method, which they call a "

For many clinicians, phage production still seems like a messy or even " He led the study, which was published last week in the journal Cell Chemical Biology..

The essence of the new technology is that scientists have taught extracts of a harmless Escherichia coli to produce viruses directed against other bacteria, pathogens of pneumonia and plague.. The “correct” phage DNA is inserted into viruses. “It’s basically a whole process of personalized phage treatment,” Westmeier says.. - The only thing that we failed to do was to cure a specific patient from whom we isolated the pathogen. But we “treated” certain bacteria with phages in our laboratory.”.



A startup founded by members of the TUM team aims to expand the library of phages that can cope with especially dangerous bacterial infections that are resistant even to “antibiotics of last resort”.

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According to the World Health Organization, human resistance to antimicrobials (antibiotics) is one of the ten most serious health threats in the world.. Thus, every year more than 700 thousand people worldwide die from infections resistant to antibiotics.. That's about 2,000 deaths a day..




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