King PASA16 the 1st
The 1st picture of our 1st phage
OUR RESEARCH
Antibiotics are perhaps the best medicine ever. They have saved the lives of millions and are one of the reasons for the vast increase in life expectancy during the past 100 years. Nevertheless, over the years of massive use of antibiotics, it has turned out that antibiotics have several negative aspects. Firstly, during the last few years medicine has begun to face a crisis of emergence of multidrug resistant bacteria, mainly in hospitals. Secondly, since they usually have wide range and nonspecific effects, antibiotics harm beneficial commensal bacteria belong to the microbiome. Lastly, antibiotics frequently fail to treat biofilms . Consequently, there is an urgent need to enlarge our arsenal against pathogenic bacterial by developing novel, specific approaches that are less prone to promote resistance and that will be used in addition to antibiotics.
Our lab is interested in one of the mos promising solution now days:
Phage therapy. Phage therapy against bacteria preceded the findings of the first chemical antibiotics. Yet, phage therapy was abandoned mainly because of the limited ability those days, to identify and estimate the risk in phage-harmful genes. Currently, with the ease of high-throughput sequencing and genome engineering, phage therapy is gaining new interest. In the lab we are working on developing phage therapy against selected pathogens.
EFDG1 phage. Our first E. faecalis phage was isolated from sewage samples. It eradicates both logarithmic, stationary and biofilm cells.