CRISPR-Cas System: Reversing Antibiotic Resistance in Bacteria

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a phenomenon threatening the efficacy of antimicrobial therapy in modern medicine. To tackle this public health menace, attention is shifting to the inclusion of a genetic approach to fight antimicrobial resistance (AMR), with the target being to effectively alter the genes that confer resistance on bacteria. The use of the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) and its associated protein (Cas) holds promise as a genetic technology that can help tackle resistance in bacteria by directly targeting and incapacitating resistance genes or inducing lethal DNA breaks. This review x-rays antibiotic resistance as a menace to modern medicine, surveys the CRISPR system, explains the application for the treatment of infectious diseases, and identifies current challenges, limitations, and future directions for translating the technology into clinical practice. This technology has potential for use in the selective elimination of resistant pathogens, elimination of plasmids harbouring resistance genes, and resensitization of resistant pathogens. Modern medicine urgently needs to adopt this technology to combat antibioticresistant infectious diseases. However, with delivery efficiency, off-target effects, immunogenicity, and ethical governance must first be tackled before implantation succeeds.