Genetically engineered phage therapy has rescued a teenager on the brink of death
Isabelle Holdaway received a lung transplant and in the process picked up an antibiotic-resistant infection.
She was sent home from the hospital underweight, with liver failure, and with skin lesions from the infection. Her survival odds were "less than 1%."
Her consultant at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London worked with a team at the University of Pittsburgh to develop an untested phage therapy. This treatment used a cocktail of three phages: viruses that solely attack and kill bacteria. Two of the three phages, selected from a library of more more than 10,000 kept at the University of Pittsburgh, had been genetically engineered to be better at attacking the bacteria. The therapy was injected into her blood stream twice daily and applied to the lesions on her skin, according to Nature Medicine.
With this therapy, which is still ongoing, "virtually all her lesions have cleared." Her treatment team is planning to add a fourth phage to the treatment in hopes of clearing the infection completely.
The article notes this is a deeply personalized therapy approach and to be careful extrapolating from a single case study. Still, with the rise in antiobiotic resistance in bacteria in recent years, using viruses to kill superbugs has been getting attention.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @04:51AM
not really knowledgable in deep about phages but i thought the cool part is that you can take a bacteria multiply it to a monoculture then add a "secret" co-factor (that is NOT the complete virus) and then *poof* the virus appears.
sounds like magic but consider that viruses are made by infected cells. the infections is not bulk mass but rather infirmation. everything required for the virus to be assembled BY THE INFECTED CELL needs to be present in the host cell already.
and this is probably whats "scary" to the health industry: every bacteria can be "turned" to produce is virus. no need for big factories with pipes and motors and stuff to produce "moldy" tablets.
but what is the magic "spell" to flip the bacteria to explode into particles that pollute neighbouring bacterial offspring? a morphogenetic field gone bad maybe? ^_^