Enemy of an Enemy.

Written by Priya Emani

On a daily basis, millions of people worldwide face bruises, surgeries, and regular medical procedures that are the norm of our world today. However, have you ever wondered the ironic nature of a world in which a mere knee scrap results in death? Tough luck, that is the reality we may soon face: the post antibiotic era.

We’ve relied on antibiotics for decades as a sole medication to ward off bacteria. However, we may be soon beaten in the race. Bacteria have caught up and antibiotic resistance has become a bigger monster under our bed. The United Nations has predicted that by 2050, the number of drug resistance infections will be killing approximately 10 million people per year.

Scientists are turning to new technologies to counter this. Or rather our closest friends…the ones right in our own bodies. An enemy of our enemy: the bacteriophage.

A bacteriophage is a virus that specifically infects bacteria and, at the same time, has no harm on humans. Bacteriophages are microscopic little creatures with geometric heads carrying their DNA and legs that land and move on the surface of a bacteria. The difference between antibiotics and bacteriophages comes from their level of precision and accuracy within our body. Antibiotics are a big mop essentially sweeping away bad bacteria but also good bacteria.

However, bacteriophages prove themselves to act like a lock and key (Lin et al., 2017) as they are precisely engineered to fit to a certain bacteria. For example, if one was specifically designed towards an E. Coli Bacterium, the bacteriophage would go directly towards that bacteria rather than anything else.

After the bacteriophage is able to find its appropriate target, it latches onto the bacteria and injects its own genetic material to hijack and overpower the bacteria to produce more of the bacteriophage itself. Afterwards, the bacteria undergoes a process of lysis, in which it bursts itself open. Millions of bacteriophages flood out and continue the process.

Now, you may be coming to a point of fascination. That’s great, but if bacteriophages have been within us, then why haven’t we been using them?

Phage therapy originated in the 1920s and 1930s, but became very irritating to work with as phages needed immense technical ability and precision for their effectiveness. Later in the 1940s, another discovery grew. Penicillin, the first major antibiotic.

Antibiotics were significantly easier to manufacture, produce, and sell in masses, resulting in the push back of phage therapy (Kortright et al., 2019). However, the resurgence of phage therapy can be seen with key cases and notable instances where antibiotics failed.

One such case is of Tom Patterson, an American Professor who contracted a pancreatic infection in Egypt that no antibiotics were able to help with. As a result, researchers around the world attempted to utilize phage therapy. After a combination of phages, three days later, Patterson woke up (Strathdee and Patterson, 2019).

The beast awoke. Phage therapy was back and the enemy of our enemy has never been sweeter. Now, due to the increasing technological advancements, phage therapy faces rapid enhancements.

For instance, the big challenge towards finding the right match of phages to potential implications, as there are more phages than all the sand grains combined on Earth, now becomes ever so easy because of AI (Nature Biotechnology, 2023).

Computational biology utilizes computer-based methods to allow matches to be found accurately within a matter of hours. In addition with emerging biotechnological methods, scientists are also able to make phages more effective (for instance CRISPR).

As of now, phage therapy isn’t being seen as entirely replacing antibiotics, but the potential that they have working in tandem together is astronomical. By advancing phage therapy, we utilize a better advancement against every developing bacteria.

Although this may be a terrifying fight, by utilizing the enemy of our enemy, the era of modernized precise healing is just starting.

References:

1. Kortright, K. E., Chan, B. K., Koff, J. L., & Turner, P. E. (2019). Phage therapy: A renewed approach to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Cell Host & Microbe, 25(2), 219–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chom.2019.01.014
2. Lin, D. M., Koskella, B., & Lin, H. C. (2017). Phage therapy: An alternative to antibiotics in the age of multi-drug resistance. World Journal of Gastrointestinal Pharmacology and Therapeutics, 8(3), 162–173. https://doi.org/10.4292/wjgpt.v8.i3.162
3. Nature Biotechnology. (2023). AI and the search for the next generation of bacteriophage therapeutics. Nature Biotechnology, 41, 151.
4. Strathdee, S. A., & Patterson, T. (2019). The perfect predator: A scientist’s race to save her husband from a deadly superbug. Hachette Books.
5. United Nations. (2021). Reporting on the silent pandemic: Antibiotic resistance and the global health threat. UN Environment Programme. https://www.unep.org/resources/report/bracing-superbugs-strengthening-environmental-action-one-health-response