CRISPR "challenges" antibiotics or solves global drug resistance problems

Source: in recent years, the global health problems caused by antibiotic abuse have become increasingly prominent More and more scientists have begun to find new ways to deal with the infection problems caused by deadly bacteria such as Clostridium difficile Among them, the most remarkable is the "harmful bacteria self destruct CRISPR pill" based on CRISPR / cas9 gene editing technology In addition to precisely editing human genes to cure diseases, CRISPR / cas9 gene editing technology has been widely used in other applications According to Jan Peter Van pijkeren, a food scientist at the University of Wisconsin Madison, scientists hope to transform CRISPR / cas9 system into a fine microbial treatment system to precisely kill those potentially deadly bacteria Although not well known to the public, Clostridium difficile is still the biggest threat to the national disease control system Due to the increasing drug resistance of bacteria, nearly 500000 people in the United States were infected with Clostridium difficile in 2015, and 15000 people died of such infection directly or indirectly Van pijkeren and others hope to be able to use phages to send an error message to Clostridium difficile, so that bacteria can carry out lethal cutting of their DNA To do this, van pijkeren laboratories are developing phages that can carry specific CRISPR information In order to get the virus into patients, the pijkeren team plans to infect it with non-toxic bacteria or probiotic mixture, in the form of pills or liquids for patients to take directly When probiotics are broken down by gastric acid through human intestine, phages can break out and infect any nearby Clostridium difficile, and inject specific CRISPR sequence to promote the self destruction of Clostridium difficile Prior to van pijkeren's research, the use of phage triggered CRISPR to effectively kill skin bacteria and help combat common diarrhea and Shigella infections in developing countries has been confirmed by academia At present, companies including eligo bioscience in France and locus Biosciences in the United States have begun to implement CRISPR / cas9-based antibacterial drugs commercially The attraction of CRISPR / cas9 antibiotics is that they theoretically kill a specific bacterium precisely and protect probiotics from harm In contrast, broad-spectrum antibiotics kill pathogens and destroy probiotics in human intestine Herbert DuPont, director of the center for infectious diseases at the University of Texas, said: "as long as we put patients together in hospitals or sanatoriums, when we give antibiotics, we are bound to encounter the problem of Clostridium difficile." Maybe that's exactly what Van pijkeren and his colleagues started to develop CRISPR antibiotics However, although gene editing antibiotics have great prospects, they still have a long way to go before they can replace the current broad-spectrum antibiotics Instead of completely replacing the traditional antibiotics, gene editing antibiotics are more likely to become the supplement of traditional antibiotics in the near future, and help people better solve the problem of global antibiotic resistance.