Speaker
Description
Antibiotic resistance is a major threat, motivating the development of procedures to eliminate antibiotic resistant bacteria. Our collaborators (E. Slack’s lab, ETH Zürich) have shown that intestinal antibodies, raised by oral vaccines, enforce the targeted bacterial strain to undergo "enchained growth", forming large clumps, which may be flushed out of the gut faster than free bacteria. They have developed a protocol combining vaccination with the introduction of a niche competitor to eliminate a pathogenic non-Typhoidal Salmonella from the gut lumen. As intestinal colonization is a highly dynamic process, we build a simple mathematical model to generate predictions on the requirements for extinction of the pathogenic strain and the time-to-extinction. We use competition data to estimate key kinetic parameters such as growth rates of the pathogenic strain and the competitor, their loss rates, as well as the carrying capacity. We then estimate the extinction probability and the extinction time distribution for different colonization strategies. Our model confirms that the preventive introduction of the competitor significantly reduces the extinction time of the pathogenic strain.
