Dynamics of Encapsulated Bacteriophage in the Gastrointestinal Tract

Abstract

Bacteriophage therapy consists in treating bacterial infections using viruses (bacteriophages) that selectively kill bacteria. Since bacteriophages degrade relatively fast in acidic environments, such as those found in the stomach of vertebrates, treatment of pathogenic enterobacteria can be enhanced by artificially encapsulating bacteriophages in microcapsules and, consequently, making them more resistant to natural degradation. Inside the microcapsules, however, bacteriophages are not able to infect bacteria, so efficient encapsulation requires microcapsules to be relatively permeable to the bacteriophages they carry. This permeability quality is somehow antagonistic to the protective role that microcapsules must also have, and thus, a trade-off does exist between them. In this article, we propose a mathematical model to study this phenomena in different biological scenarios.