Department of Biomedicine, University Basel, Basel, Switzerland; Clinic of Pulmonary Medicine, University Hospital Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
Curr Opin Microbiol. 2023 Aug;74:102328. doi: 10.1016/j.mib.2023.102328. Epub 2023 May 26.
Antimicrobial susceptibility testing is the cornerstone of antibiotic treatments. Yet, active drugs are frequently unsuccessful in vivo and most clinical trials investigating antibiotics fail. So far, bacterial survival strategies, other than drug resistance, have been largely ignored. As such, drug tolerance and persisters, allowing bacterial populations to survive during antibiotic treatments, could fill a gap in antibiotic susceptibility testing. Therefore, it remains critical to establish robust and scalable bacterial viability measures and to define the clinical relevance of bacterial survivors across various bacterial infections. If successful, these tools could improve drug design and development to prevent tolerance formation or target bacterial survivors, to ultimately reduce treatment failures and curb resistance evolution.
抗菌药物敏感性测试是抗生素治疗的基石。然而，临床上常用的药物往往疗效不佳，且大多数抗生素临床试验都以失败告终。到目前为止，除耐药性外，细菌的生存策略在很大程度上被忽视了。因此，药物耐受性和持续存在的细菌能够使细菌种群在抗生素治疗期间存活下来，这可能填补了抗生素敏感性测试的一个空白。因此，建立稳健且可扩展的细菌活力测量方法，并确定各种细菌感染中细菌存活者的临床相关性仍然至关重要。如果这些工具能够成功应用，它们可以改善药物设计和开发，以防止产生耐受性或靶向细菌存活者，最终减少治疗失败和遏制耐药性的发展。
