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Special Phage Therapy Clears a Patient's Resistant Infection After 798 Days - ScienceAlert
Jan 21, 2022 58 secs

Normally, phages infect a subset of strains of bacteria that belong to a single bacterial species, however, clinicians have been working on personalized forms of phage therapy, where phages from a prepared bank are selected by analyzing the bacterial strains isolated from the patient's bacterial infection.  .

When enough time and resources are available, clinicians can select 'preadapted' phage mutants that have an increased capacity for infecting the patient's specific type of bacterium, or that may have a reduced capacity to provoke bacterial resistance.

"In recent randomized controlled trials, these static phage cocktails showed disappointing results, which contrast with those of an increasing number of case studies using phages as adjunctive therapy, or preadapted (or even engineered) phages that are more effective against the infecting bacteria," add the authors. .

However, three months after the phage treatment, the patient's condition dramatically improved, with the bacterial infection finally beaten

The authors believe that the combination of a personalized phage treatment, coupled with the use of a longer course of antibiotics afterwards, formed a sort of one-two punch, where phages were able to break down the defensive biofilms, allowing the antibiotics a clear path to finally eliminate the bacterial infection. 

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