| Title | Gene Engineered Phage Therapy Saves Teen from Superbug | |
| Date | Thursday May 09 2019, @09:36PM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the the-enemy-of-my-enemy dept. | ||
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.
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printed from SoylentNews, Gene Engineered Phage Therapy Saves Teen from Superbug on 2024-05-16 13:32:40