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Human viral diseases are a big deal. They cause millions of deaths every year, a huge amount of illness and the resulting social and economic implications are staggering.
But we are not alone in our suffering. Bacteria are afflicted with viruses too.
Bacterial viruses or bacteriophage (phage for short) do to bacteria exactly what viruses do to our cells - invade, usurp and destroy. This begs the question, ‘why are we not killing bacteria with phage all the time?’ and it’s a good question to ask.
Phage are largely ignored by the human immune system, cheap to produce in large numbers and target only the bacterial species that is causing the disease.
As a result these little viruses are poised to be the next penicillin, and rather than to simply replace it, they may bring all the benefits of penicillin without some of the major drawbacks.
Phage make up a huge amount of the biomass of the Earth. In one millilitre of seawater you can find 9 × 108 viruses and up to 90% can be bacteriophage. That means that the oceans alone may contain up to 1.02 × 1033 bacteriophage, even as a conservative estimate.
Viruses, like all organisms, exist to replicate but viruses cannot replicate autonomously. Viruses and bacteriophages require the machinery of a cell in order to copy and manufacture their body components. For phage the cell must be bacterial.
Two types of phage exist and each uses the cell differently to produce huge numbers of phage particles. Lysogenic phage push their DNA into the bacterial chromosome and can sit dormant or slowly produce phage over time.
They can also enter the lifecycle of the other type of phage - the lytic phage. Rather than hijack the bacteria and use it as a perpetual phage factory, lytic phage overwhelm the bacterium (similar to the way our cells are over run by viruses) and forces continual phage replication. The bacteria are filled up with phage until they explode.
It’s this process that makes them a powerful option for potential therapy development.
Phage were first detected way back in the very early 20th and early work moved swiftly. Although detected, phage remained invisible even through microscopes until the 1940’s, when we could actually visualise the bacteriophage.
Of particular importance was the work of the Frenchman Félix d’Herelle based at the Pasteur Institute in France who developed the field of phage biology throughout his life always continuing to push it forward.
D’Herelle was a self-taught microbiologist who discovered phage (or the ‘invisible microbe’ as he called them) in 1916 while examining the stools of French soldiers suffering from bacillary dysentery.
He found that phage started to appear as the dysentery started to clear up and he made a connection - could the phage be removing the bacteria?
Awesome piece!
Phage therapy is already being used in some parts of Russia, and bits of Eastern Europe that used to be behind the 'iron curtain'. Soldiers are given little spray bottles of phage mixtures to spray on burns and wounds to help stop infection. Apparently though it's all more of an art than a science at the moment.
Another thing phages are good for is an adjuvent to be taken *with* the antibiotic, to help make it far more effective. So while they may not be able to replace antibiotics, there is a definite possibility they can work with them to increase their shelf life.
~Lab Rat
Not that I'm against
Not that I'm against synthetic treatments to disease at all, but I'm a big fan of respecting the efficiency of nature when attempting to solve "natural" problems like these. Unlike the few hundred years of rational thought that humans have embraced (kind of), nature has had billions of years to develop tools that we can use! I'd be curious to see what kind of natural treatments for cancer, viral infections, etc, we could find if there was a decent amount more funding available to scientists looking at non-patentable treatments. Btw I found this site on thebioreport.com, which seems to have an affinity for stories like these.
Phage Therapy Resistance in the US
We are indeed already out of time with the use of antibiotics. The secret is just not being reported too widely. The pharmaceutical industry doesn't see big profits in phage therapy, thus it has been poo-pooed here in the US as a viable treatment. Their big argument is that we don't know what the long-term results of phage therapy will be in the human body. But already the USDA is allowing phage in the treatment of animals, ones that we eat for food and also putting phages on vegetables to kill bacteria like e-coli. We eat that food with the phages on the plant material. Phages are everywhere. We live in a sea of them. Why can't we target them for use in the body. To me, this is moral question of our time...when so many people die each year from opportunistic bacterial infections, why are we holding back? All in the name of science...huh! I think there is a sea of resistance behind all the words.