Ed: fixed

There are many, many therapies that are one-shots which any particular patient can only have once. That fact by itself does not make a potential therapy invalid or un-useful.

If all you need is one shot to save someone’s life, and all you have is one shot, you take it.

(For example, many forms of radiation therapy are one-shot. There is a lifetime limit to how much radiation a person can safely have, and for many cancers, you go straight up to that limit on your first therapeutic regimen. If the therapy fails or the cancer recurs, you can’t give radiation again. But if you succeed and cure the cancer, you don’t have to.)

And of course they may be a multitude of potential ways to get around the immune memory problem.

The technology and knowledge to control bacterial populations purposefully placed into humans is so widespread and available that college and even high school students that participate in synthetic biology competitions could tell you it’s possible. Plenty of bacteria have population controls of their own by sensing their own density, and when the density gets too high, some will kill themselves through apoptosis. This gene has long since been identified and the process is well known and experimented with when it comes to bacterial control. Here was one method of population control. There are plenty other methods out there.
The oxidizing contents? If significant enough to cause damage, then surely the species has catalase in its own cytoplasm which upon release of all the cytoplasm would at least play a certain part in neutralizing it. Not to mention the numerous ways our own cells deal with oxidizing compounds. An infection large enough to cause damage due to total oxidizing contents released would cause more problems than just tissue damage from the oxidizing chemicals. An infection that large would probably already indicate your immune system is severely suppressed, and you may be heading for septic shock very shortly.

Even if the bacteria were so heavily modified as to be undetectable by the human immune system, which would normally mount a massive assault on these organisms, how would it be cleared? How would the dose be controlled? How would you control their proliferation or trigger their apoptosis? And if you were to terminate treatment by killing them, how would you prevent the oxidising contents of their cytoplasm from damaging human tissues?

The technology required to implement this “living antibiotic” is so far away from modern techniques as to be firmly in the realm of science fiction. It’s a novel organism and nothing more. Interesting sequences, proteins and concepts may well emerge from research, but to suggest this may become a clinical treatment is science sensationalism at its very worst.