Sustainable strategies for treatment of bacterial infections

Resistance to antibiotics and the consequential failures of treatment based on antibiotics makes microbial infections a major threat to human health. This problem combined with rapidly increasing life-style disease problems challenge our healtcare system as well as the pharma industry, and if we do not in a foreseeable future develop novel approaches and strategies to combat bacterial infections, many people will be at risk of dying from even trivial infections for which we until recently had highly effective antibiotics. We have for a number of years investigated chronic bacterial lung infections in patients suffering from cystic fibrosis. These infections are optimal model scenarios for studies of antibiotic resistance development and microbial adaptation, and we suggest that this information should be useful when designing new anti-microbial strategies. In this respect it will be important to choose approaches which reduce as much as increases of the antibiotic resistance burden. Our approach is founded in molecular microbiology and microbial genomics.