Doherty Applied Microbial Genomics, Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Microbiological Diagnostic Unit Public Health Laboratory, Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Microbiome. 2021 Apr 14;9(1):92. doi: 10.1186/s40168-021-01026-9.
Infectious bacterial diseases exhibiting increasing resistance to antibiotics are a serious global health issue. Bacteriophage therapy is an anti-microbial alternative to treat patients with serious bacterial infections. However, the impacts to the host microbiome in response to clinical use of phage therapy are not well understood.
Our paper demonstrates a largely unchanged microbiota profile during 4 weeks of phage therapy when added to systemic antibiotics in a single patient with Staphylococcus aureus device infection. Metabolomic analyses suggest potential indirect cascading ecological impacts to the host (skin) microbiome. We did not detect genomes of the three phages used to treat the patient in metagenomic samples taken from saliva, stool, and skin; however, phages were detected using endpoint-PCR in patient serum.
Results from our proof-of-principal study supports the use of bacteriophages as a microbiome-sparing approach to treat bacterial infections. Video abstract.
具有抗药性的传染性细菌性疾病是一个严重的全球健康问题。噬菌体疗法是一种治疗严重细菌感染患者的抗菌替代方法。然而，噬菌体治疗的临床应用对宿主微生物组的影响尚不清楚。
我们的论文表明，在一名金黄色葡萄球菌器械感染患者中，将噬菌体与系统抗生素联合使用 4 周期间，微生物组的特征基本没有变化。代谢组学分析表明，噬菌体治疗可能会对宿主（皮肤）微生物组产生潜在的间接级联生态影响。我们没有在从唾液、粪便和皮肤中采集的宏基因组样本中检测到用于治疗患者的三种噬菌体的基因组；然而，使用终点 PCR 在患者的血清中检测到了噬菌体。
这项原理验证研究的结果支持将噬菌体作为一种保护微生物组的方法来治疗细菌感染。
