Bacteriophage: Clinical Applications

Abstract

Bacteriophages, also called phages are viruses that invade bacteria, disrupt their metabolic activities and kill the bacteria by lysing their cell wall. These characteristics have given phages antimicrobial properties and can also serve as good replacement for antibiotics that have an increased record of multiple-antibiotic resistance. Phage therapy involves the treatment of infectious bacteria with lytic bacteriophage. The antimicrobial properties of phages have obvious advantages. Phages are very selective to their host, and this minimizes attack on normal body flora unlike the commonly used antibiotics, which attack infectious bacteria and normal body micro flora, giving rise to opportunistic secondary infections. Phages act at the sight of action, making the required concentration of phages utilized, while antibiotics traverse the gastrointestinal tract making them prone to degradation before getting to the sight of action, thereby reducing the therapeutic effects. Adverse drug reactions, inflammatory effects and side effects that are associated with antibiotics are not found with phages. Resistance may actually occur with phages, but they have their natural way of evolving another phage to counter it. Phages are environmentally friendly. Some already exist in the body, freely. Lastly, it takes time and costs much to develop new antibiotics, but the production of phages is based on natural selection, isolation and identification of bacteria. Bacteriophage’s gene can easily be manipulated by biotechnology approaches. This makes it possible to design bioengineered enzymes (genes) that can have any desired properties. To a large extent, this has addressed the potential clinical disadvantage with the specification of phages to their host bacteria. In this chapter, the utilization of bacteriophages in therapy vis-à-vis antibiotics will be discussed.