We have a problem with bacteria. They can make us sick. Sure, we have antibiotics, but it turns out the little buggers are smarter than we gave them credit for. They keep changing, making our medicines ineffective.
We also have a problem with viruses. They, too, can make us sick. But it turns out there are viruses that eat bacteria—bacteriophages. The idea naturally occurred: can we get a virus to eat the bacteria that are doing us harm? And the answer was: yes.
From an article at Slate:
In the 1920s and ’30s, with diseases like dysentery and cholera running rampant, the discovery of bacteriophages was hailed as a breakthrough. Bacteriophages are viruses found virtually everywhere—from soil to seawater to your intestines—that kill specific, infection-causing bacteria. In the United States, the drug company Eli Lilly marketed phages for abscesses and respiratory infections. (Sinclair Lewis’s Pulitzer–winning Arrowsmith is about a doctor who uses phages to prevent a diphtheria epidemic.) But by the 1940s, American scientists stopped working with phages for treatment because they no longer had reason to. Penicillin, discovered by the Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming in 1928, had become widely available thanks to synthetic production and zapped infections without the expertise needed for finicky phages.
But now the equation has changed. Many kinds of bacteria have become antibiotic-resistant—prompting a few Western scientists, and patients, to travel to former Soviet Georgia to give bacteriophages for treatment a try. Phages have been used in the former Soviet Union for decades because scientists there had less access to antibiotics than their American and European counterparts did. Phages were a cheap alternative, and in Soviet clinical trials, they repeatedly stopped infections. Now in a bid for medical tourists, Georgia has opened a center in its capital, Tbilisi, which offers outpatient phage treatment to foreigners. In connection with the Eliava phage research institute, which Stalin helped set up in Tbilisi in 1923, the treatment center offers personalized cures for a host of infections the United States says it can no longer do anything about.
Read the rest—interesting stuff.
The bacteriophage T4 preparing to infect its host cell:
Purdue University and Seyet LLC
Description from an NSF web page: “The structure of bacteriophage T4 is derived from three-dimensional cryo-electron microscopy reconstructions of the baseplate, tail sheath, and head capsid, as well as from crystallographic analyses of various phage components. The baseplate and tail proteins are shown in distinct colors.”
