World Conference on
Bacteriology and Infectious Diseases

Biography:

Gopal Nath, as a pioneer of Bacteriophage Therapy research in India, he has demonstrated that MDR/PDR bacteria can be treated by this alternative approach. He has conducted human trials on role of bacteriophages in wound healing. He has organized the “International Conference on Bacteriophages in River Ganga” and also founded the “Bacteriophage Society of India”. For the first time, he and his collaborators at NKI, Netherland established that Salmonella Typhi infection induces malignant transformations. He has published articles in journals like Lancet, Cell and Journal of Bacteriology. He had been at the editorial board of World J Gastroenterology. He has been one of the Judges of prestigious International King Faisal award in 2015. His efforts in bacteriophage therapy has led to visible transformation in the treatment of infectious diseases.

 

Abstract:

Emergence of pathogenic bacteria resistant to often all the currently available antimicrobial agents has become a critical problem in modern clinical practice, particularly because of the concomitant increase in immunosuppressed patients. The concern that humankind is re-entering the "pre-antibiotics" era has become very real and the development of alternative anti-bacterial modalities has become one of the highest priorities of modern medicine and biotechnology.  Despite intensive work by drug companies, no new class of antibiotics has been found in the last 20 years. Other approaches to deal resistant bacteria are also being sought for with increasing fervor. One of these might be using bacteriophages against pathogens i.e., harnessing the potential of specific kind of viruses that attack only specific bacterial pathogen to kill them. After the use of antibiotics for about half century, we have to believe that “we cannot win the war against bacteria,” But with phages, “at least we can try to shift the ecological balance in our favor”. We have carried out experiments to treat the acute as well as chronic infections. In acute infection models Pseudomonas aeruginosa and in Acinetobacter baumannii  septicaemia have been evaluated in animals. Further, we have successfully treated acute as well as chronic osteomyelitis caused by methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in rabbit model, which is extremely difficult to cure. We have demonstrated the effective in vivo use of phages on biofilm formed on metallic implants in rabbit model. We have looked into the role of bacteriophage therapy in the healing of non-healing wound of 6 week to > 5 years duration. After washing the surface with sterile saline, swabs were taken for the bacterial isolation. The bacteriophages were isolated against the different bacterial isolates from the environmental sources. We got promising results when follow-up was done for > 6 months.