Engineering the Human Microbiome, A Natural Double-Barreled Approach Towards Solving both our Current Antibiotic Resistance and Sepsis Problems |Biomedgrid

Many of the bacteria that cause life-threatening infection live in very close association with us. Escherichia coli, for example causes 80% of common community associated urinary tract infections and is also the main cause of serious (blood-stream) infection throughout Europe [1,2]. However, E. coli routinely lives as a commensal organism in our gut. In fact, the main source of infection is the human gut. The likely hood of developing one of these infections is dependent on several factors with age playing a pivotal role [3]. Typically, the infection rate increases dramatically with age with peaks in the very young (<1 year-old) and the very old (>70yrs). Another key factor is the type of E. coli strain that an individual carries in the gut since the species E. coli is composed of pathogenic and non-pathogenic strains. This means that an individual carrying a pathogenic strain is considerably more likely to develop infection than one carrying a non-virulent E. coli strain [4]. Similarly, high carriage of antibiotic resistant strains in the gut is much more likely to lead to an infection that is difficult to treat [5].