Department of Trauma Surgery, University Hospitals Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Department of Development and Regeneration, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Viruses. 2021 Aug 5;13(8):1543. doi: 10.3390/v13081543.
In times where only a few novel antibiotics are to be expected, antimicrobial resistance remains an expanding global health threat. In case of chronic infections caused by therapy-resistant pathogens, physicians have limited therapeutic options, which are often associated with detrimental consequences for the patient. This has resulted in a renewed interest in alternative strategies, such as bacteriophage (phage) therapy. However, there are still important hurdles that currently impede the more widespread implementation of phage therapy in clinical practice. First, the limited number of good-quality case series and clinical trials have failed to show the optimal application protocol in terms of route of administration, frequency of administration, treatment duration and phage titer. Second, there is limited information on the systemic effects of phage therapy. Finally, in the past, phage therapy has been applied intuitively in terms of the selection of phages and their combination as parts of phage cocktails. This has led to an enormous heterogeneity in previously published studies, resulting in a lack of reliable safety and efficacy data for phage therapy. We hereby present a study protocol that addresses these scientific hurdles using a multidisciplinary approach, bringing together the experience of clinical, pharmaceutical and molecular microbiology experts.
在可预见的未来只有少数几种新型抗生素的情况下，抗菌药物耐药性仍然是一个不断扩大的全球健康威胁。对于由治疗耐药病原体引起的慢性感染，医生的治疗选择有限，这往往会给患者带来不利的后果。这导致人们重新关注替代策略，如噬菌体（噬菌体）治疗。然而，目前仍有一些重要的障碍阻碍了噬菌体治疗在临床实践中的更广泛应用。首先，为数不多的高质量病例系列和临床试验未能显示出在给药途径、给药频率、治疗持续时间和噬菌体效价方面的最佳应用方案。其次，关于噬菌体治疗的系统作用的信息有限。最后，过去，噬菌体治疗在噬菌体的选择及其作为噬菌体鸡尾酒的一部分的组合方面是直观的。这导致了之前发表的研究中存在巨大的异质性，导致噬菌体治疗缺乏可靠的安全性和疗效数据。我们在此提出了一项研究方案，该方案采用多学科方法解决这些科学障碍，汇集了临床、制药和分子微生物学专家的经验。
