Phage therapy for Clostridium difficile infection: An alternative to antibiotics?

As a consequence of their widespread use, a critical limitation in current antibiotic therapy is bacterial resistance. In the case of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI), current antibiotic regimens may not necessarily suffer due to drug resistance, though they have become increasingly ineffective due to the dysbiosis they induce, resulting in notoriously high recurrence rates. As a result, interest in alternative treatment modalities has recently surfaced. Amongst these emerging treatments, newer investigations are being invested in the older concept of bacteriophage therapy. This approach, first identified in the early 19th century, offers a more microbe-specific treatment option that can, theoretically, pointedly target C. difficile while sparing the other bacterial organisms of the human gut. The aim of this article is to explain the intellection behind bacteriophage therapy for the treatment of bacterial infections in humans, to review the historical research on bacteriophage therapy, and to introduce the reader to recent investigations into bacteriophage therapy for the treatment of CDI.