Staphylococcus aureus
Phico has developed a SASPjectTM, PT1.2, targeted to Staphylococcus aureus, including MRSA, which will be used initially to provide a unique and key role in the vital programme to reduce MRSA infections, by controlling the transmission of MRSA.
Phico’s PT1.2 SASPjectTM has completed pre-clinical studies and is expected to enter clinical trials in 2008.
A summary of some of the microbiology data for PT1.2 is given in the posters which were presented at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) in Chicago in September 2007, and more recently at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Barcelona in April 2008.
Staphylococcus aureus is the most common cause of infections contracted whilst in hospital (nosocomial infections). It frequently causes infections in the lungs, wounds, skin and the blood and, because of the number of toxins the bacterium can produce, these infections may be life threatening.
MRSA is a global problem and MRSA levels have risen dramatically in hospitals in both the UK and the US with these countries forming Phico’s primary target markets. The introduction of mandatory recording in the UK in 2002 saw the number of reports of MRSA bacteraemia increase by approximately 40%. In fact, in many of the countries that will form Phico’s target market in Europe alone, the prevalence of MRSA is worryingly high at 25% to 50%.
In addition, new Community Acquired MRSA (CA-MRSA) strains have spread rapidly across the globe since they were first reported in the late 1990’s. These CA-MRSA strains have proven to be highly transmissible and often encode the toxin PVL which can make them highly virulent. There are concerns that these CA-MRSA strains may further add to the difficulties of controlling MRSA infections in hospitals and, in fact, CA-MRSA has become the most frequent cause of skin and soft tissue infections presenting to emergency departments in the US.
MRSA is now such a serious (and lethal) problem in hospitals that significant effort is being put into implementing various infection control measures as a way of minimising the spread of MRSA in hospitals and thus reducing the number of infections. MRSA infection control is vital to many National health systems, for example screening all high risk patients entering hospitals to see whether they carry MRSA and treating where necessary is now a legal requirement in the US state of Illinois and this practice is expanding across the US. In the UK the Government has recently announced its intention to introduce screening of all elective admissions to NHS hospitals in England by March 2009, and introduce screening for all emergency admissions to English hospitals in the three years thereafter. Department of Health guidelines have been recently updated to recommend the screening of all high risk patients admitted to NHS hospitals and the decolonisation of carriers with antibacterial washes and nasal decontamination. Phico's intranasal SASPjectTM in the drive to control MRSA infections in hospitals.
Posters from ECCMID 2008
SASP: Rapid Bactericidal Activity against USA strains of Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)
The Efficacy of SASP Targeted to Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in Mixed Staphylococcal Cultures
Posters from ICAAC 2007
SASP: A Novel Antibacterial DNA Binding Protein and its Targeted Delivery for Staphylococcus aureus
SASP: Rapid Bactericidal Activity against MRSA and Stationary Phase Staphylococcus aureus
SASP: Kill Kinetics against Diverse Antibiotic Resistant Staphylococcus aureus