Engineering Microbes To Kill Pseudomonas
Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - 06:40
in Health & Medicine
Pseudomonas aeruginosa (see figure 1) is a human pathogen that colonizes the respiratory and gastrointestinal tract, where it can cause life-threatening infections in patients with a compromised immune system, such as cancer or cystic fibrosis patients. P. aeruginosa is resistant to many antibiotics. Current treatments comprise antibiotic chemotherapy and bacteriophage therapy. However, There are some setbacks to these therapies. The chemotherapy kills many kinds of bacteria, upsetting a healthy human microbiome, and the bacteriophage therapy relies on the use of a virus, which has a limited therapeutic potential as the host can develop specific antibodies against the virus. read more