Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

"Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) infection (CDI) is one of the most frequent causes of health care-associated infectious diseases in Canada and other industrialized countries, with a mortality rate of approximately 6%. A Canadian study has reported that CDI for in-hospital adult patients is 65 per 100,000 patient-days in Canada. In addition, recurrence rates following standard antibiotics therapy are high, particularly for the elderly (greater than 40% for those over the age 65). Healthy bacteria in the colon are the key defense against CDI; the primary risk factor for developing CDI is the use of antibiotics because they kill these healthy bacteria allowing C. difficile to proliferate. Current treatment for CDI relies on other antibiotics (metronidazole or vancomycin), which lends itself to treatment failure as CDI is caused by exposure to antibiotic(s) to begin with. Fecal transplantation, where a bacteria mixture extracted from a stool sample from a healthy, screened individual is rectally administered to an affected patient, is developing into a highly effective therapy as it leads to restoration of healthy bacterial population in the infected patient and eradicating C. difficile. However, this therapy also comes with challenges: the need to identify a suitable donor for each patient; the lengthy time and cost required to screen for transmissible pathogens in the donors; as well as negative psychological factors. Given the unacceptable failure and recurrence rates using standard therapy, an alternative treatment is of paramount importance. Our team sets out to better understand CDI and to develop a rational and novel, microbiota based therapy to combat CDI. We expect to generate valuable information about innate bacterial community assembly patterns in both CDI patients and healthy individuals, establish effective microbiota to combat proliferation of C. difficile, develop novel probes for C. difficile surveillance, and most importantly set up the stage to pursue microbiota transplantation therapy as a new approach to combating CDI."