‘Bacteriophage therapy cures long-healing wounds quicker’
VARANASI: A study by a team of scientists led by renowned microbiologist Prof Gopal Nath of the department of microbiology, Institute of Medical Sciences, BHU, has found that wounds that took months to years to heal could be cured in a matter of days through Bacteriophage therapy.
The findings of the study have been published in National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Institutes of Health, United States, said Prof Nath.
Prof Nath said that bacteriophage therapy was used on 27 patients with acute wounds, while the other 27 patients with acute wounds were given conventional therapy. “The bacteriophage therapy healed the acute infected wounds in 21 to 25 days, while conventional therapy healed the acute wounds in 45 days,” he said.
The cost of bacteriophage therapy is three times cheaper than conventional therapy.
Prof Nath said, “As part of our study, phage therapy or bacteriophage therapy was used to cure acute and chronic infected wounds in animal clinical studies. It gave wonderful results and showed efficacy against Pseudomonas aeruginosa in a mice wound model.
“We evaluated the efficacy of phage cocktails in animal models’ acute and chronic osteomyelitis caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Moreover, we also observed biofilm eradication from K wire in rabbits wound infection model.”
Prof Nath said that clinical trials are necessary to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of data generated in the preclinical experiments before getting translated reliably into clinical practice. Clinical trials of phage therapy initiated by the BHU have reported the efficacy of topical phage in healing chronic wounds in three prospective exploratory studies and no adverse events mimicking the results in vivo animal models.
The team, led by Prof Nath includes Prof SK Bhartiya, Prof VK Shukla, Dr Pooja Gupta, Dr Harishankar Singh, Dr Dev Raj Patel, Rajesh Kumar, Dr Rina Prasad, and Subhas Lalkarn, etc.