In a new book, a science journalist recounts the story of a lifesaving treatment for infection that scientists broadly dismissed until recently
Imagine that the next time you catch a stomach bug and antibiotics fail to work, you knock back a vial of clear liquid. The solution teems with, viruses resembling tiny rocket ships. These benign microbes exclusively dock onto and destroy bacteria, and your infection clears in a matter of days. Such a future is within reach, journalist Lina Zeldovich writes in her new book
As microbes develop cleverer and cleverer ways to evade antibiotics, some scientists have returned to bacteriophages, scooping them from wastewater and testing their pathogen-killing abilities in the laboratory and clinic. Experimental trials are now underway to test bacteriophage therapies against superbugs such asimplicated in Crohn’s disease.
Now that we have this pressing issue of antibiotic resistance, more money is coming into bacteriophage research. In the early 2000s pioneers told me it was impossible to get any money. That’s been changing, maybe in the past eight years or so.That’s not a bad word for it. I think the real pivoting point was the Tom Patterson case. In 2015 Patterson contracted an antibiotic-resistant bacteria calledin Egypt, while traveling there on vacation with his wife, Steffanie .
We don’t have solid knowledge of what happens in the body. With anything intestinal or urinary tract infections, bacteriophages can go very far. Intravenously? That’s a different story. Generally speaking, adverse reactions are very unlikely if phages are prepared correctly: If you give phages intravenously, that phage solution has to be really, really purified, with no bacterial debris . Otherwise your system can go into. A hundred years ago there weren’t any good technologies to adequately purify solutions, but that’s no longer a problem today.
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