[Bacteriophage Therapy: Retrospective Review and Future Prospects].

At present, bacterial infections are mainly treated with antibiotics, but new treatment methods are urgently needed because of growing problems with antibiotic resistance. Therefore, phage therapy will be a potential solution to the problem of bacterial drug resistance, and the combined use of bacteriophage and antibiotics is also considered a potential treatment option. However, there has not been any well-designed clinical controlled trials on phage therapy. More future research needs to be done to solve the problems of phage therapy, for example, its narrow antibacterial spectrum, the uncertainty regarding treatment safety, and the bacterial resistance. Some refractory diseases such as breast cancer and alcoholic hepatitis are difficult to treat clinically. The successful experimental research on bacteriophages reported in these fields provides new ideas of treatment for more refractory diseases in the future. In addition, bacteriophages also showed promising performance in vaccine applications and osteanagenesis. We herein summarize the existing weaknesses of phage therapy and its application prospects in treating systemic diseases, hoping to promote further clinical application research of phage therapy.

Circulating tumor cells predict survival benefit from chemotherapy in patients with lung cancer.

BACKGROUND: This meta-analysis was to explore the clinical significance of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in predicting the tumor response to chemotherapy and prognosis of patients with lung cancer. METHODS: We searched PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Database, Web of Science and reference lists of relevant articles. Our meta-analysis was performed by Stata software, version 12.0, with a random effects model. Risk ratio (RR), hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were used as effect measures. RESULTS: 8 studies, including 453 patients, were eligible for analyses. We showed that the disease control rate (DCR) in CTCs-negative patients was significantly higher than CTCs-positive patients at baseline (RR = 2.56, 95%CI [1.36, 4.82], p < 0.05) and during chemotherapy (RR = 9.08, CI [3.44, 23.98], p < 0.001). Patients who converted form CTC-negative to positive or persistently positive during chemotherapy had a worse disease progression than those with CTC-positive to negative or persistently negative (RR = 8.52, CI [1.66, 43.83], p < 0.05). Detection of CTCs at baseline and during chemotherapy also indicated poor overall survival (OS) (baseline: HR = 3.43, CI [2.21, 5.33], p<0.001; during chemotherapy: HR = 3.16, CI [2.23, 4.48], p < 0.001) and progression-free survival (PFS) (baseline: HR = 3.16, 95%CI [2.23, 4.48], p < 0.001; during chemotherapy: HR = 3.78, CI [2.33, 6.13], p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Detection of CTCs in peripheral blood indicates poor tumor response to chemotherapy and poor prognosis in patients with lung cancer.