Peter Kriger

The Utilization of Genetic Modification Technologies of Phages for the Treatment of Infectious Diseases

Started Oct. 5, 2023

Abstract or project description

With the rise in the number and prevalence of multiple antibiotic resistant bacteria around the world, the global medical community needs a solution other than more antibiotics. This research project aims to describe how genetic engineering of phages can be used to manipulate the naturally occurring coevolutionary arms race between bacteriophages and bacteria to fight highly adaptive infectious diseases more effectively. Phages normally infect a specific range of bacteria to replicate and spread, though the selection and isolation of a naturally occurring phage that is lytic for a particular bacterial strain is difficult. Through the use of genetic engineering, we can develop phages to fight an infection instead of finding one in the environment. This can potentially be a cheaper, faster, and more precise method of curing bacterial infections and may nullify the threat of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Throughout this paper, various studies and data will be consulted to draw logical conclusions about the future of phage therapy, antibiotic resistance, and the effects of utilizing genetic engineering on these topics. It was deduced that, while phage therapy was more effective at treatment multi-drug resistant infections than antibiotics, the combined use of antibiotics and phage therapy was the most successful approach to eliminating the infecting bacterial strain. Additionally, though expensive, CRISPR genetic engineering was shown to have the ability to minimize the drawbacks of phage therapy, such as the difficulties of phage selection and the specificity of phage targeting (targeting an extremely narrow range of bacteria); thus, CRISPR would have many uses in the fields of phage research and phage therapy. With the combined use of CRISPR and phage therapy, with the possible addition of antibiotics, there are countless methods of fighting ever evolving bacterial infections, even those that are antibiotic resistant.