An elderly female patient with progressively worsening chronic low back pain presented to the University of Colorado Hospital for a challenging spinal fixation surgery in the Summer 2020.   In the weeks that followed, her course was complicated by tissue dehiscence along the spinal surgical incision with underlying vertebral osteomyelitis secondary to Pseudomonas aeruginosa hardware infection.  Given the patient’s age and history of cerebral vascular aneurysms, her medical team determined that she was a poor candidate for oral quinolone suppression therapy of the hardware infection.  No longer a surgical candidate and unwilling to spend her life on chronic intravenous antibiotic therapy, the patient faced the decision of hospice versus experimental phage therapy.  Bravely, she chose the latter.  In partnership with collaborators at Yale University, we detail our successful single patient experience of phage therapy against P. aeruginosaspinal hardware infection.  If the outcome were to hold, to the best of our knowledge, this case would represent the first cure of a spinal hardware infection with salvage phage therapy.

Viruses are ubiquitous and often infect more than one host. Since decades, hundreds of scientists have performed experiments to characterize the host range of bacteriophages. The number of these experiments has dramatically increased the past few years because of the revived interest for phage therapy. However, results from these interaction tests are rarely published under an exploitable format easily accessible to the community.

We conceived the viral host range database (VHRdb, https://viralhostrangedb.pasteur.cloud//) as an online resource that centralizes experimental host range data. The VHRdb is a unique tool that allows users to identify suitable hosts for a given virus and conversely a list of viruses infecting specific hosts. Moreover, independent sets of data can be compared to generate, visualize and rank outputs.

The VHRdb is open to contribution by any user upon registration. Contributed data are public or can remain private until publication, if any. Links to publications and sequence identifiers can be implemented, when available. Initiated from data obtained from interaction tests between bacteriophages and bacteria, the design of the VHRdb is compatible with viruses infecting all living forms.

The VHRdb represents a unique resource for the community to rapidly find or disseminate the range of hosts suitable for a virus, an information that can have broad interest for educational, scientific, medical and applied purposes.

Here is the link to the associated publication:

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bioinformatics/btab070/6140780