Phages amid antimicrobial resistance

Abstract

Increasing levels of resistance to antimicrobial agents have created chaos in the health sector, with several infections not responding to antibiotic treatments. Search for alternative strategies has looked at bacteriophages as potential therapeutics and in the last couple of years. There are reports of phages being successfully used to treat life-threatening infections. Phages are also mobile elements that exchange genes between and within different bacterial species and account significantly for strain differences across and within a species. A gap in metagenomics analysis and conservative methods of detection have failed to give an accurate account of the role of bacteriophages in antimicrobial resistance. Recent studies have focussed on the role of bacteriophages in the adaptation of pathogens to new hosts and the emergence of multidrug-resistance, which are a significant concern against phage therapy. This article presents a comprehensive account of weighing the odds of phage therapy verses phage-mediated antimicrobial resistance.

Keywords:

• Antimicrobial resistance
• bacteriophages
• phage therapy
• horizontal gene transfer

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.