Microbiota transplantation and/or CRISPR-Cas in the battle against antimicrobial resistance

Abstract

In the last decades we have witnessed a dramatic increase in infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria (MDRB). Organizations such as the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) consider these infections to be an emerging global disease and a major public health problem. Although the development of new antibacterial drugs seems to have reached a dead end, potential new therapeutic strategies can be pursued [1]. Recently WHO reported a list of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to guide the investigation, discovery and development of new antibiotics, mentioning as its first critical priority those Gram-negative bacilli such as Acinetobacter baumannii and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, as well as third-generation cephalosporin- and/or carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae [2].