Dr. Hazan Ronen (PhD)
Antibiotics are perhaps the best medicine ever. They have saved the lives of millions and are one of the reasons for the vast increase in life expectancy during the past 100 years. Nevertheless, over the years of massive use of antibiotics, it has turned out that antibiotics have several negative aspects. Firstly, during the last few years, medicine has begun to face a crisis of emergence of multidrug resistant bacteria, mainly in hospitals. Secondly, since they usually have wide range and nonspecific effects, antibiotics harm beneficial commensal bacteria belong to the microbiome. Lastly, antibiotics frequently fail to treat biofilms. Consequently, there is an urgent need to enlarge our arsenal against pathogenic bacterial by developing novel, specific approaches that are less prone to promote resistance and that will be used in addition to antibiotics. Our lab is interested in one of the most promising solution now days:
Phage therapy. Phages are viruses that specifically and efficiently infect bacteria. The key benefits of phage therapy are: i) Phages can be propagated directly on the patients' isolate, thus specifically increase their efficacy to this pathogen by adaptation. Moreover, ii) in the case of phage-resistant mutant emergence, in contrast to antibiotic resistance, phages can be rapidly evolutionary improved (phage “training”) and genetically manipulated. Additional, relatively fast isolation of new phages against the resistant pathogen is feasible. iii) Phages are highly strain-specific, with low impact on the commensal or environmental flora; iv) phages multiply at the infection site and disappear concurrently with the target pathogen; and v) phages can efficiently destroy biofilms which antibiotics fail to do. Due to all the above, and the urgent need for other therapeutic means in cases where antibiotics fail, phages are rapidly gaining new interest worldwide.
Our lab is conducting and studying all the steps of phage therapy from isolation and characterization of phages, via testing them in vitro and vivo up to using them in human treatment.