Cystic fibrosis associated bacterial resistance

Cystic fibrosis is an inherited disease that causes a buildup of thick mucus in the lungs, leading to repeated bacterial infections that damage the lungs and can cause respiratory failure.

Adding to this problem when the bacterial infection become resistant bacteria the treatment of the patient become really challenging.

Patient suffering from cystic fibrosis (CF) need real life innovations to treat them and bacteriophage could have a great potential in to resist bacterial resistance.

Mycobacterium abscessus is a nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) that often infect CF patient. Persons with cystic fibrosis (pwCF) represent the most vulnerable population for NTM lung disease. This led to poor treatment outcome and high decline of lung function when the only solution is the lung transplantation which are not indicated when patients are refractory of treatment.

Phage have slowly raised as the only therapeutical solution for these patients but still show real challenge to engineer the perfect phage. Therapeutic phages need to be personalized for each patient as the M. abscessus clinical isolates vary greatly.

Real life cases are common: Jarrod Johnson a 26-year-old cystic fibrosis patient who has suffered repeated lung infections throughout his life. After finding that he then developed an M. abscessus infection (resistant) which prevented him from getting a lung transplant and loosing his lung capacity to 30%, he has been treated with phages. Within 2 months, there were various signs the treatment was working, and after a year, his infection was felt to be totally cleared. He has now received aa lung transplantation that allow him to live a normal life.

The full story of phage recovery : https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/may/13/phage-therapy-fight-against-drug-resistant-infections-antibiotics?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The article published : https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00471-8?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867422004718%3Fshowall%3Dtrue