- According to the WHO, antimicrobial resistance is directly responsible for at least 1.27 million deaths per year.
- If the current trend continues, it is expected that by 2050 the figure will be 10 million fatalities.
- Self-medication, among other reasons, has made drugs less and less effective.
The researcher at the Center for Genomic Sciences (CCG), Víctor Manuel González Zúñiga, explained that in the laboratory they isolated multiple bacteriophages in order to find out how they act to infect bacteria. One of the objectives is to deal with the antimicrobial resistancewhich according to recent studies causes close to one million deaths a year in the world.
“Phages are biological elements that are introduced into the bacterium, bind to the cell membrane and transfer their DNA inside the cell where they replicate. When they replicate, they express a series of proteins and reproduce, making thousands of bacteriophages inside the cell and eventually killing it. For this reason they are known as ‘predators’, as they are very effective in eliminating a bacterium”.
Any bacterium in the world, whether beneficial or pathogenic, has associated bacteriophages. They are small viruses, on the order of nanometers, that carry genetic material that can even be useful to the bacterial cell, such as toxins and other genes for virulence and resistance to antibiotics.
These studies, said González Zúñiga, began more than a century ago with the French Canadian researcher Felix Hubert d’Herelle and led to the use of bacteriophages against Shigella, Salmonella, and various intestinal bacteria. The pioneering works were carried out, for the most part, in the countries of the former Soviet Union.
However, in the West they were abandoned due to the “boom” of antibiotics and they were only continued in countries that were under the Soviet regime. Currently there is the Eliava Institute, in Georgia, which produces and markets phage-based materials to combat, for example, gastrointestinal diseases.
Today in various universities around the world they have resumed this research which is called “phage therapy, an alternative to antibiotics.”
In the case of CCG, phages are studied for two bacteria of clinical importance: Staphylococcus aureus and Acinetobacter baumanniifrom samples obtained from hospitals in Mexico City.
Nosocomial infections
The member of the Evolutionary Genomics Program of the CCG added that they chose to work on phages against the S. aureus and A. baumannii bacteria because they are opportunistic and pose a threat to hospitalized patients.
S. aureus is commonly found harmlessly in the throat, nose, and skin. However, in hospitals it affects sick people and colonizes places where it should not be, such as the heart, the intestine, and can cause septicemia.
“It has also been found in patients with heart valves, prostheses, as it has several properties that make it very virulent and can stick to surfaces and develop a film that prevents antibiotics from penetrating it effectively.”
A. baumannii from hospital settings is dangerous because it is flexible in acquiring mobile genetic elements; that is, of DNA segments. Both virulence genes and antibiotic resistance genes can be transferred between bacteria, making it doubly important.”
According to González Zúñiga, the objective is to find the most appropriate phages to attack multi-resistant bacteria to antibiotics, and fight them when there is no antibiotic to eliminate them.
Currently, protocols have been developed to care for patients with this alternative therapy, when there is no other treatment resource. Most of these cases have been registered in the United States and the United Kingdom, where successful experiences have emerged.
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