Abstract
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria infections pose a threat to public health. Considering the difficulty in developing new antibiotics, it is an urgent need to develop alternative therapies against bacterial pathogens. Bacteriophages (phages) are evaluated as potential substitutes or adjuncts of antibiotics because they are abundant in nature and could specifically lyse bacteria. In this review, we briefly introduce phage therapy and its advantages compared with traditional antibiotic therapy. We also summarize new emerging phage technologies, such as CRISPR-Cas, synthetic phages, etc., and discuss some possible obstacles and potential risks in the application process. We believe that, with the advancement in synthetic biology and delivery technology, phage therapy has broad prospects in the future.
Highlights
The development of traditional antibiotics is becoming more and more difficult, and the problem of bacterial resistance is becoming increasingly prominent, which has posed a serious threat to human health
Phage therapy is a very attractive solution to fight against drug-resistant bacteria
More and more in vitro and in vivo studies have shown the ability of bacteriophages to prevent and treat drug-resistant bacteria
Summary
Due to the discovery and application of broad-spectrum antibiotics in the 1940s, diseases caused by bacterial infections can be effectively treated, and the morbidity and mortality rates have dropped significantly; the phage therapy was quickly dwarfed [2]. Bacteriophages have once again attracted researchers’ attention since they can lyse bacteria and are not likely to cause bacterial resistance compared to traditional antibiotics because of their selective killing ability and co-evolution with host bacteria. Some attempts to use bacteriophages against pathogenic bacteria in animal breeding, plant disease prevention, food manufacturing, and so on, have been reported [8,9,10]. There have been successful cases of applying bacteriophage to the treatment of human drug-resistant bacterial infections [11,12,13]. The possible obstacles, risks, and application prospects of phage therapy are discussed
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