Personalised microbe-containing lotion may keep skin infections at bay

New Delhi: Researchers have found a new way that may help fight skin infections such as eczema – by putting the body's own good bacteria into a lotion and then spread that lotion onto the skin to keep harmful microbes at bay.

For the study, researchers from University of California, San Diego in the US took bacterial samples from patients' skin, picked out certain species and cultured them in a lab, and then put these bacteria into a lotion.

They found that, for five patients with a skin condition, the bacteria-rich lotion protected them against infections by destroying harmful germs on their skin.

The findings show that "bacteria have a very important role to play in our immune defence," said Richard Gallo from the University of California, San Diego.

Researchers looked at patients with eczema, a condition which causes itchy, red, inflamed skin, 'Live Science' reported.

They found that the patients who had persistent eczema tended to be deficient in the friendly bacteria that kill a type of bacteria called Staphylococcus aureus.

In contrast, people without eczema have an abundance of the helpful bacteria.

The researchers swabbed the patients' skin, and cultured the few friendly strains of bacteria they could find. They grew more of these bacteria in the lab, and added the microbes to a lotion.

They had the patients apply their own personalised microbe-containing lotion to one arm and regular moisturiser to the other.

After 24 hours, in all five patients, only the arms treated with the microbe-containing lotion showed near total improvement, and in two patients, the staph pathogens were destroyed entirely.

However, researchers are yet to determine whether thepatients were "cured" of the staph pathogen, or would need to keep reapplying the lotion in the future.

The next-stage trial that is underway now is to just use one universal strain and apply it to everyone.

The study was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

(With PTI inputs)