Bacteriophages are not yet, but soon will be, the new black
There's lots of talk about drug-resistant bacteria these days in the medical community and the blogosphere. It's a real problem in operating rooms, locker rooms, state penitentiaries, and other places. When I was a wee freshman in pharmacy school, I came across a Wired magazine article — I think it was Wired, anyway — that discussed the use of viruses to achieve positive therapeutic outcomes, specifically against bacterial infections.
Since that time, the use of oncolytic viruses to destroy cancer tumors has become pretty hot, and is what most providers think of when they hear the word "virotherapy." Using non-pathogenic viruses (virotherapy) to treat an infection or cancer isn't new, though — it's actually older than penicillin, and fell out of favor with the medical community when penicillin started being mass-produced. Penicillin is easier to make, handle, store, and works just as effectively, and doesn't carry the stigma of introducing a live virus into the human body. It has always been more popular in Eastern Europe (particularly Russia) than here in the West. It is thought that due to language barriers, the West might not know everything the former Easter Bloc countries do about phage therapy — a problem that will be quickly corrected, I would think.
Except penicillin doesn't work all the time anymore. Neither do its successors. Drug-resistant bacteria and the infections they cause are becoming more prolific and causing more deaths.
Personally, I think it's time to break out the phages, again. Most phages only attack very specific bacterial subtypes, leaving the human intact; when the specific bacteria are destroyed, the infection is over, and the viruses stop reproducing. It's not every day someone's work from nearly 100 years ago is trotted out as being nearly state-of-the-art. It goes to show just how out-of-favor work with phages became. Lots of medical professionals don't even know it exists. It's not taught at the pharmacy school I attended, for instance. Not in medical microbiology, not in virology.
D'Herelle concluded that these phages had something to do with the healing process of bacillary dysentery and he wanted to harness their power for fighting infections. First, he treated chickens with phages against an infectious disease called fowl typhoid. As he had soon discovered the picky appetite of phages he isolated for these experiments specific phages against Salmonella gallinarum, the agent of fowl typhoid.
In 1919, he thought he had done enough research and decided to start treating humans. D'Herelle's first patients were five children with bacillary dysentery. They were all cured.
One does indeed hope that the renewed interest in virotherapy isn't quashed by the FDA, as some believe it will be. I am hopeful that the therapeutic outcomes of any trials will shine brightly enough on their own merit that they will be approved for human use. There is some hope that the stigma will be overcome, as I will report on next.
[Image from UPenn Veterinary School]
[tags]Medicine, pharmacy, viruses, phage therapy, bacteria, microbiology[/tags]
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