For young people with cystic fibrosis, lung infection with Staphylococcus aureus, MRSA, is common and is treated with antibiotics in the hope that this will prevent a decline in lung function. However there has recently been debate over the role S. aureus plays in CF lung disease. Researchers from the University of Warwick have used a new model of CF lungs which could be used to make better decisions about future use of antibiotics.
S. aureus is commonly found on the skin of healthy people, it can cause lung infection and abscess, and is often present in the mucus and sputum of children with cystic fibrosis. When S. aureus – including the antibiotic-resistant form, MRSA – is found in people with CF, it is treated with antibiotics, but exactly how S. aureus affects the lungs in people with this condition is unknown.
Previous research models have often looked at S. aureus in the lungs of mice, however when S. aureus is infected into mouse lungs, abscesses form and abscess are extremely rare in people with CF. In the paper ‘An ex vivo cystic fibrosis model recapitulates key clinical aspects of chronic Staphylococcus aureus infection’, published in the journal Microbiology, researchers from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick, have found that using left over pig lungs from a butcher, and synthetic mucus that mimics CF lung secretions, that S. aureus tends to aggregate in mucus, not invade the lung tissue as it does in mice.
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