According to a story from ArcaMax, history was recently made when a 15 year old teen with a severe “superbug” case of Mycobacterium abscessus infection was successfully treating using specially modified viruses that were tuned to kill the bacteria. While more study will be necessary, as only a single patient was treated, the results nevertheless suggest that possibility that this approach to treatment, called phage therapy, has potential.
What Are Phages?
Phages are a type of virus that replicates itself using bacteria. While this normally is not a lethal process for the bacteria itself, slight changes to the genetic makeup of a phage can turn it into a bacteria killer. The scientists had to peruse a database of nearly 10,000 phages in order to identify three types that could potentially treat the infection.
Phage Therapy
As the heavy use of antibiotics has resulted in increasingly more prevalent strains of bacteria that have developed resistance, new approaches to fighting infection are needed. This is where phage therapy comes into play. These therapies have been in use for some time in Russia and Eastern Europe for infections that appear resistant to antibiotics, but they are currently no approved phage therapies in the Western world. However, this may very well change in the future as antibiotic resistance becomes more common.
Phage therapies are extremely precise. Often a certain phage can only kill a specific strain of bacteria. This can make finding the right phage to use rather difficult, but it also means that there is little chance for serious side effects. This case was unique in that the phages were genetically altered. The patient, who had recently undergone a double lung transplant because of cystic fibrosis, was also facing liver damage, infection with the Epstein-Barr virus, and diabetes.
The phages that were selected were not lethal to M. abscessus in their natural state, and instead functioned more as a parasite. The patient, while not free of symptoms, is improving.
While phage therapy is still in need of further refinement and study, tests such as these suggest that this medical approach could play a more prominent role in the future.
