In a remarkable medical breakthrough, researchers have claimed to develop a therapy that puts predator microbes to attack the dangerous bacteria responsible for causing eye infections.
Drug resistant infections, eye infection, good bacteria, bad bacteria, predator microbe, pathogen microbe,
The findings, published in the online journal PLoS ONE, suggests that infusion of predator microbes, or the good bacteria, kills off dangerous bacteria that cause eye infections that lead to blindness and have recently grown resistant to antibiotics.
The study
The study, embarked by the researchers from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, had three major components.
The first component identified two antibiotic-resistant ocular pathogens, or the ‘bad bacteria, namely, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Serratia marcescens. These pathogens were found to be susceptible to being attacked and killed by at least one of two other bacteria, Micavibrio aeruginosavorus and Bdellovibrio baceriovorus.
The latter two bacteria, researchers said, acted as the predators and worked against the pathogens. The predators are believed to be “good,” as they are non-infectious and can exist within the human body.
In the second phase, the researchers tested whether the exposure to good bacteria ill cause any kind of damage to the human cells.
For this, human corneal-limbic epithelial cells that are native to the eye were exposed in vitro to M. aeruginosavorus and B. baceriovorus bacteria. Researchers found that such exposure did not cause either toxicity or inflammation in the cells.
In the third phase, the researchers tested the toxicity of various microbes and their live organism’s innate immunity in live worms.
Researchers infused two “good” predator bacteria into live worms from the species Galleria mellonella. While a shot of the pathogenic bacterium aeruginosa is 100 percent fatal in worms, those injected with two “good” predator bacteria had 11-day survival rates between 93.3 and 100 percent, a strong indication that the “good” bacteria were not toxic in worms.
“Taken together, our findings leave us confident that, in isolation, pathogenic bacteria are susceptible to successful attack by predator bacteria, predator bacteria do not appear inherently harmful to ocular cells when applied topically, and a live organism can tolerate the predator bacteria well,” study’s lead researcher, Daniel Kadouri, an assistant professor of oral biology at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey said.
“The time to test all three phenomena simultaneously in the eye tissue of a live organism may now be at hand,” Kadouri added.
