New approach could lower antibiotic requirement

The research also suggests that antibiotic doses could be reduced by up to 50 times using a new approach based on bacteriophages. It is the phages' ability to channel through bacterial cell membranes that boosts antibiotic effectiveness.

“Pseudomonas bacteria for example are particularly multi-resistant to antibiotics because they have efflux pump mechanisms that enable them to throw out antibiotics. A pore in the cell wall would obviously cancel the efflux effect,” Mr Hagens explains.

Experiments in mice revealed that 75% of those infected with a lethal dose of pseudomonas survived if the antibiotic gentamicin was administered in the presence of bacteriophages. None survived without the phages.

Pseudomonas bacteria cause pneumonia and are a common cause of hospital-acquired infections. The overuse of antibiotics since the 1940s has slowly created a host of infections that are resistant to antibiotics. MRSA, for example, is rapidly spreading through hospitals, affecting more than 8,000 people in the UK every year.

The bacteriophage approach would also be particularly useful for treating cases of food poisoning, because the lower doses of antibiotic needed would not disrupt the friendly bacteria in the gut.