The challenge

Bacteria are present everywhere, they have settled every ecological niche in nature. Many of them are beneficial or at least harmless. Bacteria can invade an organism from any natural environment, e.g. by breathing or ingestion. In humans and animals, they occupy the skin or mucous membranes from where they can spread to other organs and cause infective diseases.

Depending on the status of the host´s immune system and the type of bacteria, infections may become dangerous or even fatal. Today, increasing antibiotic resistance more and more turns nonhazardous bacteria to deadly pathogens.

Bacterial infections have high impact on human health. Fast detection of bacteria is the key to rapid and targeted treatment or removal of pathogens to reduce the risk for humans.

The solution

Hyglos develops products for diagnostic and antimicrobial applications based on proteins derived from naturally occurring bacteriophages. Bacteriophages are viruses that have evolved for millions of years to only recognize and infect bacteria everywhere they live, even under extreme conditions.

The idea of using the power of nature for human benefit is nothing new. However in contrast to the use of complete “viable” bacteriophages, the application of isolated bacteriophage proteins provides significant advantages. Bacteriophage proteins have been optimized by nature and now can be tailor-made for specific applications in diagnosis and elimination of dedicated target bacteria.

As current technologies have various drawbacks, Hyglos has chosen to creatively use its expertise to design bacteriophage proteins for such dedicated functions.