Question: What made you choose to work of finding alternative ways to treat bacterial infections?

Jessica Forsyth answered on 8 Dec 2020:

During my undergraduate degree I learnt a lot about the evolution of bacterial resistance. This made me keen to learn more about the problem of antibiotic resistance and investigate ways in which we may be able to solve this problem. One such way is to find alternatives treatments to antibiotics that can be used when the bacteria responsible for an infection are resistant.

What do I mean by the evolution of bacterial resistance? Well, usually if you have a bacterial infection, you will be prescribed with a course of antibiotics by your Doctor. These antibiotics act to kill the bacteria that has invaded your immune system and is responsible for making you poorly. However, bacteria are living things and they don’t want to be killed! So, they evolve mechanisms by which they can avoid being killed by antibiotics. If they’re successful in doing so then antibiotics are not longer able to clear your infection and you can stay unwell. All around the world we use a lot of antibiotics and the more antibiotics that are used, the more likely bacteria are to become resistant. If antibiotics don’t work, it means we need to find alternative methods to treat infections so that we can continue to make sure that we stay healthy and that people don’t get too many infections when they go into hospital and so on.

I’m currently exploring the use of bacteriophages, or phage therapy, as an alternative method of treating bacterial infections. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria (they don’t infect us!). If we are able to find a bacteriophage that specifically infects a resistant bacteria then we can use this to clear the resistant bacteria from a patients body and then antibiotics can be used to treat the infection as the only bacteria left in your body will be those that are susceptible (able to be killed) by antibiotics. This means phage therapy is unlikely to replace the use of antibiotics but will instead be used alongside them to ensure we can continue to treat bacterial infections.