It's estimated that 50%-60% of women go through at least one of these embarrassing situations in their lifetime, including frequent urination, pain or burning feeling when urinating, and cloudy, darker, smelly, or even bloody urine. Be cautious! This is how urinary tract infection (UTI) feels like. Urinary tract disorders are afflicting global women not only with uncomfortable feelings but also threatening their health by developing into kidney infections or more serious infections. And the incidence rate of UTI is increasing annually!

How Is Urinary Tract Infection Developed?

A urinary tract disorder is a type of bacterial infection that can occur in the urinary tract, urethra, bladder, and kidneys. Usually, urine consists of fluids, salts, and waste products but is sterile or free of bacteria, viruses, and other disease-causing organisms. However, the UTI could occur if bacteria from another source, such as the nearby anus, translocates across the perineum and gets into the urethra or ascend to the bladder. It's really a short trip for bacteria when it comes to women and this is why "wiping from the front to back" after using the toilet is helpful for women in preventing infections.

Escherichia coli (E. coli), most harmlessly existing in the human intestinal tract, contribute to 90% of urinary tract disorders when getting into the urinary tract. Other pathogens, including Proteus mirabilis, Staphylococcus saprophyticus, Enterococcus faecalis, Group B Streptococcus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Klebsiella spp. can also be troublemakers.

Treatment

Sometimes, the body can often resolve minor and uncomplicated urinary tract infections in its own way. By estimation, 25 to 42 percent of mild infections could clear on their own. However, serious infections and continuous symptoms require prompt diagnosis and treatment. Currently, antibiotics are the only front-line treatment, for which the Health Protection Agency estimated 14% of all antibiotics were prescribed for UTI in 2011, approximately costing the National Health Service (NHS) at least £124 million a year.

Nevertheless, side effects of persistent and prophylactic use of antibiotics cannot be ignored, including failure to prevent a recurrence, causative pathogen resistance, and collateral damage in the gut and vaginal microbiome.

Urinary Microbiomes: New Therapeutic Opportunities

It's been widely studied that microbiomes play an important role in protecting the host against infection from pathogenic microbes. And recent research based on advanced technologies in metagenomics has shown that certain microbes exist in the urinary tract at low numbers, though the urinary tract was believed to be sterile in the past. An opinion that probiotics could be used in the urinary microbiome for UTI was proposed by researchers in recent years since they can be used as an intervention in the gut and vaginal microbiomes.

The most dominant genera in both urinary and vaginal microbiome are Lactobacillaceae and some of the genus present are also similar, so balancing the number of Lactobacillus spp. via the supplementation of probiotics would be the primary solution for the compromised state. Live biotherapeutics, as a revolutionary class of medicines. are designed and used to sense and keep a dynamic balance between the host cells and diverse microbiota microbes, thus maintaining a healthy state.

Research on Lactobacillus spp. as the next generation probiotics has made great progress to develop live biotherapeutics for urinary tract disorders and a burgeoning number of life science companies have added the next generation probiotics services for urinary tract disorders to their product pipelines.

About The Next Generation Probiotics

Traditional probiotics are live microorganisms that are intended to have health benefits when consumed as food or dietary supplements, while next-generation probiotics (NGPs) are beneficial bacteria not only in traditional applications but also as organisms developed for pharmaceutical application with therapeutic purposes just like drugs. Currently, advanced tools for genetic sequencing and modifying bacterial genomes have promoted the development of new strains of probiotics and the verification of their applicability in biomedical research.

Besides urinary tract disorders, NGPs also show promising therapeutic effects in other fields. Live biotherapeutics drug discovery brings new opportunities for urinary tract disorders as well as many other diseases, such as chronic inflammation-related diseases such as colitis, obesity/metabolic syndromes, diabetes mellitus, liver diseases, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases.