Bacteriophage JSF4 can be a Potential Prophylaxis Therapy for Cholera: An Alternative Approach to Antibiotics

doi:10.34104/ajpab.020.01210128

Abstract

Cholera remains a major risk in developing countries like Bangladesh, particularly after natural or man-made disasters and becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics. Effective prevention strategies will be essential in reducing the disease burden of these bacterial infections. Here, we used the specificity and rapid-acting properties of bacteriophages as a potential prophylaxis therapy for cholera, a severely dehydrating disease caused by Vibrio cholerae 01 or 0139 serogroup. In this study, a single bacteriophage, JSF4 specific for V. cholerae 01 serogroup, was used to reduce the severity of cholera therapeutically in the infant mice model. Bacterial counts were decreased up to 106 times in the intestines of bacteriophage-treated animals and increased up to 24 times in the untreated control mice intestines. This is the first report that a single bacteriophage JSF4 might be useful to treat cholera caused by V. cholerae 01 serogroup strains and could be an alternative to antibiotics. In the future, JSF4 bacteriophages may also have profound implications in phage therapy for controlling cholera caused by pathogenic V. cholerae 01 serogroup strains.

Highlights

The causative organism Vibrio cholerae is a facultative anaerobe, gram-negative, non-spore forming curved rod, about 1.04-1.06 μm long flagellated bacterium (Lekshmi et al, 2018; Maheshwari et al, 2011)
Given the welldocumented challenges associated with the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, bacteriophages might yet provide a viable alternative to antibiotics
Phages are able to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria and amount of phages increases proportionally to the number of infecting bacteria. This treatment strategy is inspired by the natural life cycle of V. cholerae in which blooms of the bacteria during outbreaks are followed by the expansion of lytic bacteriophage (Reyes-Robles et al, 2018; Silva-Valenzuela et al, 2019), The microorganism we examined in this study was Gramnegative bacteria

Summary

Introduction

The causative organism Vibrio cholerae is a facultative anaerobe, gram-negative, non-spore forming curved rod, about 1.04-1.06 μm long flagellated bacterium (Lekshmi et al, 2018; Maheshwari et al, 2011). Cholera (meaning being ‘a gutter’) is the correct name for the disease, caused by the entry of contaminated water (Lekshmi et al, 2018). Sanitation, and access to clean drinking water in developing countries like Bangladesh cholera has become an emerging disease for centuries. It flourishes at the time of societal disruption, such as natural calamities like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti or the current refugee crisis in Yemen (Orata et al, 2014; Rabaan et al, 2019). Out of 200 serogroups of V. cholerae, only the serogroups O1 and O139 were the causative agent of current epidemics, and V. cholerae 01 is the major infectious agent

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Discussion

Conclusion