Quorum Sensing inhibition to battle infectious diseases

Antibiotic crisis – Back to the start A famous quote of Charles Darwin reads: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” Every living creature is evolving, is adapting to changes of the environment, all the time. With the discovery of antibiotics physicians found, adapted and refined powerful compounds to efficiently kill bacteria. The overuse of antibiotics will eventually render the same useless, as we can observe already right now. Against all logic and warnings antibiotics are still being used carelessly and are expelled to the environment in large quantities. Quorum quenching (QQ) strategies with the acylase PvdQ could be an alternative or addition to conventional antibiotics. The goal of this treatment is to attenuate virulence factors and hinder the formation of biofilms. The clearance of the infection will be performed by the immune system of the host or with the help of antibacterial compounds. Applications of QQ enzymes could be the functionalization of various medical relevant surfaces to mediate anti biofilm properties. We demonstrated in this work that the QQ enzyme PvdQ has indeed the potential to be used against A. baumannii, and P. aeruginosa infections in vitro and in vivo. The potential of QQEs justifies to put more effort in research and refinement of this technique and eventually QQ treatment approaches could offer powerful tools to fight bacterial infections in the future.