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| Clostridium difficile |
Antibiotic treatment of hospitalized patients poses a serious risk for the colonization of Clostridium difficile. Infection with this anaerobic, spore-forming bacterium is characterized by a wide spectrum of symptoms including diarrhea, fulminant pseudomembranous colitis, and death. Though treatment of C. difficile with antibiotics is often effective, a number of treated patients experience a relapse in infection following the cessation of antibiotic therapy. It is believed that these recurrent infections may be linked to a condition termed dysbiosis, which is characterized by a general imbalance of the intestinal microflora resulting from continuous antibiotic exposure.
In recent years, the use of a probiotic-based approach has been proposed as a promising therapy for the treatment of C. difficile infections. To determine the ideal combination of probiotic strains that both resolves C. difficile disease and restores a healthy intestinal microflora, Lawley et al. employed the use of a C. difficile murine infection model that parallels many aspects of human disease. In the study, the murine model was infected with an epidemic strain of C. difficile that was able to out-compete health-associated intestinal bacteria, allowing for the maintenance of dysbiosis. Following the establishment of infection, the group used fecal-transplantation as a model to identify a mixture of six phylogenetically-diverse bacteria that were able to trigger the expansion of health-associated intestinal microflora and resolve C. difficile infection within the mice. Overall, the results from this study highlight the therapeutic potential of probiotic bacteriotherapy in the treatment of C. difficile and other forms of dysbiosis.
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