[How to fight parasitic infectious diseases with bacteria. The case of Wolbachia pipientis].

In Nature, no individual can live in isolation; hence, living organisms are forced to interact with each other. This necessity has led many organisms to establish heterogeneous relations to enhance their ability to adapt to the environment, thus acquiring evolutionary advantages. These relationships are sometimes so intense, that on the long term the organisms may lose their individual identity. An example of these associations is the endosymbiotic ones, where eukaryote organisms generally harbor different prokaryote organisms. The endosymbiotic bacterium Wolbachia pipientis is a species described by Hertig and Wolbach in 1924. This microorganism can be isolated in a large variety of eukaryote organisms, with which it maintains different links. Until now, this species has only been described with 11 serogroups numbered from A to K within the Wolbachia genus. This work is intended to illustrate the relationship of Wolbachia pipientis with human pathogenic filaria and with arthropods, as well as to describe the implications of this bacterium in the treatment of filariasis. Finally, this work tries to describe recent studies that have targeted the use of artificially-created Wolbachia pipientis virulent strains that, once inoculated in infectious diseases-transmitting vectors, develop negative effects within them in order to, in this way, erradicate mosquito-transmitted infectious diseases for which no treatment is available at the moment or the prevention of its transmissibility has not been achieved.