Bacteriophage therapy for treating A. baumannii infected wounds

Treatment of bacterial-infected wounds is one the most critical problems in modern medicine, and it presents one of the most significant challenges for US troops during combat operations. The management of bacteria in wounds is complicated by the existence of multidrug-resistant strains and mutants. Therefore, novel modalities for preventing and treating wound infections, one of which may be highly purified and characterized bacteriophage preparations, are required. Lytic phages (i.e., bacterial viruses that infect and lyse their specific bacterial hosts) have been used to treat bacterial infections since their discovery during the first decade of the 20th century. However, their therapeutic use gradually declined in the “Western World” after the advent of antibiotics. At the present time, there is renewed interest in phage-based prophylactic and therapeutic approaches because phages are active against multidrug-resistant, pathogenic bacterial strains and mutants. Our current application proposes to develop a potent lytic bacteriophage preparation/cocktail against A. baumannii – a major wound pathogen of particular concern to the US Army, and an increasingly important public health problem. In addition, we will develop two murine wound-infection models for future studies evaluating our A. baumannii phage cocktail’s efficacy in treating A. baumannii wound infections.