“Three years after phage-antibiotic combination treatment, the patient has regained ambulation and mobility, usually with the aid of crutches, and participates in sporting events,” such as cycling, the study authors reported. “And there are no signs of recurrent K. pneumoniae infection.” The case study suggests that a combination of phage therapy and antibiotics can effectively treat drug-resistant K. pneumoniae, Turner said. The case study cannot show how much of the patient’s improvement could be attributed to the phages and how much came down to her new antibiotics regimen. But given that the patient showed some improvement prior to the switch in antibiotics, and that no previous antibiotics had worked at all, the results hint that the phages made a difference. In the future, Turner said that he anticipates that, when the use of phage therapy becomes more widespread, the treatment will sometimes be used alongside antibiotics, as in this case, though it could also be effective in isolation, “especially if you’re going after pan-drug-resistant bacteria” that don’t respond to any antibiotics whatsoever, he said. To figure out how phage therapy can best be applied, we’ll have to gather more data through large-scale clinical trials, not just isolated case reports, he said. “Really, the future of phage therapy does rest upon abundant data from clinical trials,” he said. “This is just the gold-standard … phages have to be held up to the same gold standard.” Such trials are already underway.
2022-01-14
This goes against one of the key assumptions of the theory of evolution. Genetic changes that crop up in an organism’s DNA may not be completely random, new research suggests. That would upend one of the key assumptions of the theory of evolution. Researchers studying the genetic mutations in aContinue Reading
