Phenotypic Testing of Drug Susceptibility Spectrum of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Based on Mycobacteriophages

In recent years, much attention has been paid to phage technologies as promising methods for rapid testing of drug susceptibility of bacteria, including Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Mycobacteriophages are capable to infect specifically M. tuberculosis, which makes it possible to develop new effective, cost-efficient diagnostic tests, as well as fundamentally new drugs for tuberculosis treatment. This review analyzes twenty-seven publications describing main methods for testing the spectrum of drug susceptibility of M. tuberculosis based in mycobacteriophages. The advantages of these methods are the following: rapidness (results are obtained within 24-96 hours from the test start), and specificity (based on a strict host range of the phage). This allows for the rapid detection of M. tuberculosis and its susceptibility to anti-tuberculosis drugs.