Animal Models to Translate Phage Therapy to Human Medicine.

Alessia Brix,Anna Pistocchi,Massimo Aureli,Marco Cafora

doi:10.3390/ijms21103715

Alessia Brix, Anna Pistocchi + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms21103715

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Abstract

Phagotherapy, the use of bacteriophages to fight bacterial infections as an alternative to antibiotic treatments, has become of increasing interest in the last years. This is mainly due to the diffusion of multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacterial infections that constitute a serious issue for public health. Phage therapy is gaining favor due to its success in agriculture and veterinary treatments and its extensive utilization for human therapeutic protocols in the Eastern world. In the last decades, some clinical trials and compassionate treatments have also been performed in the Western world, indicating that phage therapy is getting closer to its introduction in standard therapy protocols. However, several questions concerning the use of phages in human therapeutic treatments are still present and need to be addressed. In this review, we illustrate the state of art of phage therapy and examine the role of animal models to translate these treatments to humans.

Highlights

Phagotherapy, the use of bacteriophages to fight bacterial infections as an alternative to antibiotic treatments, has become of increasing interest in the last years
In the second part of this review, we describe how the generation of animal models of bacterial infections might help in the translation of phage therapy to human clinics
The healthy state of the recovered nematodes was confirmed by the fact that they produced healthy progeny after 100 h after phage treatment. These two studies take into account the mortality as a unique parameter for testing a phage’s efficacy and effects, the results indicated that C. elegans can be a useful animal model for these studies

Summary

Introduction

Phagotherapy, the use of bacteriophages to fight bacterial infections as an alternative to antibiotic treatments, has become of increasing interest in the last years. This is mainly due to the diffusion of multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacterial infections that constitute a serious issue for public health. Phage therapy is gaining favor due to its success in agriculture and veterinary treatments and its extensive utilization for human therapeutic protocols in the Eastern world. Several questions concerning the use of phages in human therapeutic treatments are still present and need to be addressed. We illustrate the state of art of phage therapy and examine the role of animal models to translate these treatments to humans. The end point of phage infection is the death of the bacterium, usually through its lysis, and the

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