Human milk oligosaccharides and antibiotics: a valuable combination to control infectious diseases

Abstract

Infectious diseases remain a major health challenge and are becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to the spread of antibiotic resistance. A novel approach is to exploit human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs), which are now known to reduce the prevalence of infectious diseases among breastfed infants. HMOs have bacteriostatic or bactericidal activity against a wide range of important pathogens, such as Streptococcus agalactiae (group B Streptococcus), Streptococcus pneumoniae, Campylobacter jejuni, Clostridioides difficile, Entamoeba histolytica and Candida albicans. Furthermore, HMOs can act synergistically with antibiotics, reducing the minimum inhibitory concentration for certain antibiotics by up to 32-fold. This could extend the therapeutic window of some antibiotics and also reduce the doses required to treat infectious diseases. Given the risk posed by the emergence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, it would be advantageous to further exploit this synergism between antibiotics and HMOs.