China News Service, Beijing, May 4 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Springer Nature's academic journal "Nature-Communications" recently published a microbiology research paper showing that by combining antibiotics and surgery, phage therapy proved to be effective. Multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium chelonae infection in immunocompromised patients.
The findings are the first to report a successful treatment of Mycobacterium chelae infection with phage therapy, and the researchers also describe the clinical efficacy observed in their paper.
According to the paper, Mycobacterium chelseacus is commonly associated with skin and soft tissue infections, mainly in patients with weakened immune systems, but is difficult to treat because of its pan-resistance to antibacterial drugs.
Phages can infect and kill bacterial hosts, but their interactions with the human immune system are complex, and their clinical application has been limited.
Phage therapy has previously been shown to be successful in the treatment of Mycobacterium abscessus infections (M. abscessus is known to be pan-resistant to antimicrobials), but no successful treatment against M. chelae has been reported.
Corresponding author Jessica Little, Brigham and Women's Hospital, USA, and colleagues used a drug in immunocompromised patients with seronegative arthritis and clinically diagnosed M. The bacteriophages were treated with a combination of antibiotics and surgery.
They saw very good clinical results in this patient, with reduced skin lesions and nodules months after treatment, and no adverse reactions to phage therapy.
According to the authors, the findings suggest that phages may be a promising treatment for multidrug-resistant infections.
They also caution that further research is needed to better understand the human immune response and the safety of phage therapy (especially given the clinical burden of infection in immunocompromised patients), as well as mycobacterial resistance.
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