New trial marks a milestone in synthetic biology

One of the linked papers [1] is a surprisingly approachable review of probiotic E. coli, with an interesting comment about antibiotics, probiotics, and phage therapy (and also suggests the treatment covered in the article would need to be constantly ingested):

> Over the past few decades, probiotic applications of E. coli have gained scientific credibility, though a lot of research has been conducted with in vitro or animal models only, while relatively few human studies support the claimed or predicted effects. Of the three products discussed here, most is known about EcN, which is a surprisingly poor long-term colonizer of the human gut. This strain was originally isolated based on its antagonistic capacity in order to combat infections, but this treatment application became out of fashion as antibiotics entered the field. Now that these threaten to backfire, with pathogenic bacteria sooner or later developing resistance against the antimicrobials they are exposed to, interest has increased in alternative methods that have been applied in the past, including phage therapy and probiotics. This could introduce a revival of the original concept introduced exactly a century ago by Alfred Nissle.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5063008/pdf/euj...