The Effective Phage Therapy

Recently, a 15-year-old girl had visited the London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for getting a double lung transplant. It was the time of summers during the year 2017. Her lungs were largely struggling to reach even a third of their normal function. She was suffering from cystic fibrosis which is a genetic disorder that blocks the lungs with mucus and plagues patients with continuous infections.

For about a period of eight years, she was on antibiotics to control two extremely stubborn bacterial strains. When weeks had passed after the transplant, the doctors observed redness at the place of her surgical wound and signs of infection were visible in her liver. Later, they noticed nodules i.e. pockets of bacteria pushing up through the skin – all over her arms, legs, and buttocks. The girl's infection had worsened by this time and traditional antibiotics were no more useful for her. Then a miracle happened. A new personalized treatment proved helpful for the girl. The treatment is based upon genetically engineering bacteriophages, viruses that have the capability of infecting and killing the bacteria. In about the next six months, almost all of the girl's skin nodules just vanished off and her surgical wound began closing. Alongside her liver function was getting better. This was reported by the scientists on May 8, 2019, in the journal Nature Medicine. Graham Hatfull, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Professor at the University of Pittsburgh stated that the treatment demonstrated for the first time the safe and effective application of engineered bacteriophages in a human patient. This treatment offered a personalized approach to fighting with drug-resistant bacteria. It could even effectively be used more often for resisting diseases like tuberculosis. Hatfull stated that the main idea is to make use of bacteriophages as antibiotics -- as something that can be used to kill bacteria that is the root cause of infection. The concept of phage therapy has been in existence for nearly a century now. But until recent times, there wasn't much information about the treatment's safety and efficiency. In the year 2017, the doctors in San Diego, California, effectively put to use phages so as to treat a patient with a multidrug-resistant bacterium. Hatfull stated that this case, and the increase in the antibiotic resistance, has indeed increased the interest in phages.

By: Anuja Arora

Content: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190508134554.htm