Poster Presentation Australian Society for Microbiology Annual Scientific Meeting 2016

Personalised treatment: the best strategy to combat antibiotic resistant Helicobacter pylori (#238)

Alfred Chin Yen Tay 1 , Mary Webberley 1 , Binit Lamichhane 1 , Fanny Peters 1 , Barry Marshall 1
  1. University of Western Australia, Crawley, WESTERN AUSTRALIA, Australia

Helicobacter pylori is a gram negative spiral bacilli, infecting half of the world population. It is related to variety of upper gastrointestinal disorders like peptic ulcer disease, non-ulcer dyspepsia, premalignant lesions, gastric cancer, and mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) lymphoma. Gastric cancer is the fifth most common cancer worldwide and in Australia only it causes 1,100 deaths each year. Though triple therapy is the recommended treatment for H. pylori infection in Australia, its efficacy is declining. This may partly be contributed to influx of migrants from the neighbouring developing countries where antibiotics are not strictly regulated. Many European countries have already abandoned the use of triple therapy and replaced it with a more effective quadruple therapy. However, as there is no guideline for the choice of antibiotics in the quadruple therapy, a variety of off labelled antibiotics were used to combat antibiotic resistant H. pylori which have given rise to random antibiotic resistant patterns in H. pylori. Treating patients recklessly without knowing the antibiotic resistant profile not only increase the antibiotic resistance in H. pylori, but also make other harmful gut bacteria resistant. Therefore, in Helicobacter pylori Research Laboratory, Marshall Centre for Infectious Diseases, Research and Training (University of Western Australia), under the guidance of Professor Barry Marshall, we have been practising personalised treatment plan for over 10 years with cure rate of more than 90%. This is higher than the 70% cure rate achieved by standard rescue therapy in the US. Personalised treatment plan not only help in eradicating the multi-drug resistant H. pylori strains effectively but also prevent unwanted emergence of other antibiotic resistant gut pathogens.