The Next Phage

[roo_ster]

Neat article on phages, which is an olde-tyme solution to bacterial infections.  They are being used outside the USA to treat anti-biotic resistant bacteria.  BUt not here in the USA, where we either hack out the infected flesh or let the patient die due to lack of FDA approval.


http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-03/next-phage

"How to heal an infection that defies antibiotics? Another infection. Doctors in Eastern Europe have used lab-grown viruses to safely cure millions of wounds. So why can't we do the same here?"

[Sindawe]

Cool, and about darn time too.

"They had these 10-foot-tall fermenters, like big cooking pots, and they used them to make millions of doses of phage medication a year,"

Phages were the bane of our process when I worked in Biotech.  We took great pains to exclude the little hosers from the culture media and post sterilization additives.  Just a few live particles would turn 24 hours of bacterial growth and all its lovely red recombinant Hemoglobin into junk in just a few hours.

[Firethorn]

Discover magazine had an article on them a few years ago.

It was part of my formative plan to use microchip sensor/testing technology to quickly determine what was wrong with you, then ship you the treatment by next day air or something.  Tailored to your physiology, genetics, et...

I look at antibiotic treatment like opening another front in a war - the bacteria is already under assault by the person's immune system.  That fight won't be over until the person or the infection is dead.  Standard antibiotics are like chemical weapons - slaughter the enemy with gas.  Phages are like hitting them with a plague - the more bacteria there is, the more the plague spreads, so one dose is MORE effective the bigger the infection.  A very elegant solution, I think.

Given the long history the treatments have, and how bad current treatments can be (amputation, etc...), worrying to the point of amputating over concerns of a possible allergic reaction from a mutated phage is silly.

[AJ Dual]

Given the long history the treatments have, and how bad current treatments can be (amputation, etc...), worrying to the point of amputating over concerns of a possible allergic reaction from a mutated phage is silly.

I can't disagree with that.

Bacteria cell walls are fundamentaly different from animal cells, more like a plant cell, IIRC. Which is why antibiotics (at least the original ones, some newer ones use different mechanisims...) can kill bacteria, without being poisonous to human tissue.

A virus that mutated so far as to stop invading bacterial cells, and start invading human cells is kind of like a species of spider evolving into a whale over the course of just a decade. Viruses that do already invade human tissue are around us and evolving into new potentialy deadly forms around us all the time anyway.