Antibiotic misuse and the lack of drugs that act through novel mechanisms negatively affect the management of difficult-to-treat infections. This challenge poses a major threat to human health.
Because of this, scientists are on a constant quest for alternative ways to treat bacterial infections. A promising potential intervention to address this concern is the therapeutic use of bacteriophages or phages.
Bacteriophages refer to viruses that solely and selectively target and kill bacteria. They can infect specific species of bacteria without negatively affecting human or animal cells. Phages exist in thousands of different types. They can also be found anywhere, from the soil to the human guts.
The ability of phages to kill bacteria is harnessed to create a potential treatment known as phage therapy. It was developed as a treatment for bacterial infections a decade before the discovery of penicillin.
Antibiotics obliterate harmful bacteria while damaging the microbiota at the same time. In contrast, each phage has evolved to target specific bacterial strains narrowly. While phage therapy gains attraction as a viable alternative to traditional antibiotics, finding the right bacteriophage for a given infection remains challenging. Conventional methods involve inconvenient culture and time-consuming assays.
At Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, experts have developed an on-chip nanotweezers that can trap and manipulate bacteria and virions using only minimal light energy. They collaborated with the CEA Grenoble and the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) to conduct the study entitled "Optical Trapping and Fast Discrimination of Label-Free Bacteriophages at the Single Virion Level."
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