Towards phage therapy against multi-drug resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae

The misuse of antibiotics has led to the emergence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacteria, being a major global threat [1]. The World Health Organization has drawn up a list of multidrug-resistant pathogenic bacteria, among which are critical nosocomial pathogens that can cause serious and often lethal infections, such as Klebsiella pneumoniae. K. pneumoniae MDR strains are an outstanding pathogen in need of alternative solutions. Phages, viruses of bacteria, have been proposed as promising biomedical tools [2], and this project has focused on the isolation of novel lytic phages from the environment against all reference capsular types of K. pneumoniae, including high-risk clinical clones [3-4]. We have isolated and characterized (phenotypically and genomically) more than one hundred Klebsiella phages. Our results are encouraging and provide a battery of phages against pathogenic K. pneumoniae MDR that could be used in biomedicine