Sahil Khanna, MBBS: Promising C Difficile Treatments on the Horizon

It can be challenging to develop new treatments for Clostridioides difficile infections (CDI), mainly because the disease itself is a multifaceted disease.

Some individuals are already colonized with the bacteria and do not need treatment, while others have active disease and come down with the infection. The individual nature of the disease is coupled with the fact that the antibiotics used to treat the disease do not actually kill the spores.

This leads to many patients resolving the initial infection, but as soon as antibiotics are stopped the infection eventually returns.

In an interview with HCPLive®, Sahil Khanna, MBBS, Professor of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, explained where he’d like to see C difficile treatment research focus on in the future.

“The field needs to go to narrow spectrum antibiotics and a spore antibiotic and then on top of that you need to restore the microbiome because that’s the Holy Grail as to why C difficile started at the first instance,” Khanna said.

However, Khanna said there is a lot of hope in the field as there are a number of products in development that could have a large impact and many of the measures put in place to curb the spread of COVID-19 have also resulted in a reduction of C difficile spread.

On October 14, Khanna chaired an HCPLive State of Science event called Institutional Perspectives in Infectious Diseases: Management of C. Difficile.