A New Clinical Approach to Combating Antibiotic Resistance in Intensive Care

A pilot comparative clinical study evaluating bacteriophage therapy for ventilator-associated pneumonia caused by multidrug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae has been published in Critical Care journal. This pathogen represents one of the most challenging causes of infections in intensive care units, with increasingly limited therapeutic options.

The study was conducted by a consortium including the Lopukhin Federal Research and Clinical Center of Physical-Chemical Medicine, the Federal Research and Clinical Center for Intensive Care and Rehabilitation, Scientific and Production Center "Micromir", and the Gorbacheva Research Institute of Oncology, Hematology and Transplantation.

A key methodological innovation of the study is the consideration of phage therapy not as an individualized experimental intervention, but as a hospital-adapted strategy. The authors employed a pre-formulated phage cocktail developed based on genomic sequencing and capsular type analysis of circulating clinical isolates specific to the hospital setting.