Summary:<p>- 68 year old male catches bacterial infection - Acinetobacter baumannii - on vacation in Egypt<p>- Traditional antibiotics courses don't work<p>- Wife suggested trying bacteriophages - aka "phages" - which are baceteria-targeting viruses<p>- Phages are not FDA approved, but can receive "compassionate-use authorization" — effectively an acknowledgment that nothing with an FDA license can save the patient’s life<p>- 23,000 people a year die from antibiotic resistant bacterial infections and phages are not necessarily on the radar due to their own bio-diversity (single phage for a single bacterium vs mostly catch-all antibiotics)<p>- The male patient was treated with phages, which worked, and lived
This treatment has always been popular / common in the (former) Soviet Union. Here is an article from 2014 on it: <a href="https://gizmodo.com/soviet-doctors-cured-infections-with-viruses-and-soon-1587311881" rel="nofollow">https://gizmodo.com/soviet-doctors-cured-infections-with-vir...</a><p>Also interesting is that medicine was never a particularly well paying job in the Soviet Union. At best it would be comparable to a civil engineer today; very much respected, but certainly not earning what a software engineer (or US doctor) would.
Kurzgesagt goes through bacterophages in this video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg</a><p>I think this is the case mentioned by Kurzgesagt in the video, although he doesn't use names, so I can't be sure. Super cool, anyways!
A lot of cystic fibrosis patients I know that have been colonized with bacteria, such as pseudomonas, resort to phage therapy. Typically they do it in Georgia (former Soviet Union state that was very active in Phage Therapy). Many CFers swear by phage therapy. It needs to be individualized, with adaptation to every individual.
Interesting plot twist regarding the former Soviet Union:<p>"D’Herelle was a restless researcher who seems to have felt undervalued despite being awarded jobs in Paris and Vietnam and at Yale. That insecurity made him vulnerable to an offer he received in 1933 to relocate to Tbilisi in Georgia, home territory of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. With a protégé, Georgi Eliava, d’Herelle co-founded the Eliava Institute of Bacteriophages, Microbiology and Virology. Stalin showered the institute with attention and money because it offered something he badly wanted: a scientific achievement that he could portray as a pure product of communism. Antibiotics became the basis of infectious-disease medicine in the West, but behind the Iron Curtain, phages took their place."<p>"Eliava was murdered in a political purge in 1937, and d’Herelle died in 1949. Their institute dwindled, but it survived the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the Georgian civil war the following year. When the former USSR opened up to the West, physicians in the United States and Europe learned the Eliava Institute was one of the few places in the world where researchers were still studying and administering phages. That was fortunate timing, because antibiotics in the West were losing their power under the onslaught of antibiotic resistance."<p>It's interesting to consider how ideology (capitalist vs communist) contributes to different approaches to problem solving. Is there anything about bacteriophages--including their manufacture and use--that actually makes them more "communist"?
there are a number of startups that have formed in the last year or two genetically engineering phages to treat disease. resistant bacterial disease is a common target, but given the growth in literature linking the microbiome to diseases from autoimmunity to cancer, there are companies trying to engineer phages to knockout bacteria implicated in non-infectious disease<p>eligo, locus biosciences, biomx have received venture funding and there are many earlier stage companies as well. engineered phage therapy for cancer will be a field to watch this year
Perhaps this is a superficial comparison, but to me it's odd about the approval difficulty of phages considering that vaccines like the annual flu vaccine also rely on assembling new recombinations of flu strains every year too.<p>In general why do vaccines seem to be allowed approval to target specific strains only, but antibiotics need to be general purpose as implied by the article?
Kurzgesagt video on bacteriophages released a few days ago.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg</a>