from Hacker News

A woman turned to a natural enemy of bacteria to save husband’s life

by lhuser123 on 12/24/22, 6:52 PM with 15 comments

  • by MikeDelta on 12/24/22, 8:47 PM

    I remember this article discussed on HN a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32036825

  • by folli on 12/24/22, 10:25 PM

    Phage therapy comes up every so often on HN. Some comments on why it's not more widespread and unfortunately not a cure-all for bacterial infections:

    - narrow range: phages have very specific host requirements, i.e. they usually work only on very specific subtypes of bacteria. This means you will need to spend a significant effort on finding a matching phage to a given pathogenic bacterial strain. It's almost a type of personalized medicine. Antibiotics on the other hand are usually very broad and work on a wide range of strains.

    - Resistance to phages: bacteria are much more adapted to deal with phages than with antibiotics. Bacteria can become immune to phages within a couple of generations, for antibiotics it takes significantly longer. So if the first problem can be overcome (a broadly acting phage cocktail), resistance will be an even bigger problem than with antibiotics. Fun fact: the well known CRISPR system used for genetic engineering originally stems from such a bacterial system that deals with phage immunity.

    - Manufacturing: antibiotics can rely on well established protocols for large scale production on the cheap mainly relying on chemical synthesis. Phages on the other hand will be needed to grow in a bacterial host culture (you can't build them synthetically) and will need extensive purification steps. You don't want to intravenously inject any bacterial remnants into a patient. Add to that the large diversity of phages with ever changing host requirements and it becomes a nightmare for production.

  • by amelius on 12/24/22, 8:16 PM

  • by voisin on 12/24/22, 8:48 PM

    Perhaps I am simply not imaginative enough but I simply do not have any clue how the following could occur in three weeks. What am I missing? This seems like bullshit, similar to how I felt reading about Elizabeth Holmes in the early days, baffled how someone without any training could miraculously change medical testing.

    > Then she convinced phage scientists around the country to hunt and peck through molecular haystacks of sewage, bogs, ponds, the bilge of boats and other prime breeding grounds for bacteria and their viral opponents. The impossible goal: quickly find the few, exquisitely unique phages capable of fighting a specific strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria literally eating her husband alive.

    > Next, the US Food and Drug Administration had to greenlight this unproven cocktail of hope, and scientists had to purify the mixture so that it wouldn’t be deadly.

    > Yet just three weeks later, Strathdee watched doctors intravenously inject the mixture into her husband’s body – and save his life.

  • by m3kw9 on 12/24/22, 8:48 PM

    She also had many good connections to pull this off esp the approvals. So not everyone gonna be able to pull this iff

  • by m463 on 12/24/22, 8:48 PM

    I remember reading an article in wired back in 2003, and since then heard basically very little about phages:

    https://www.wired.com/2003/10/phages/

  • by adriand on 12/24/22, 8:51 PM

    Fascinating story that is also rather terrifying considering the steady decrease in the efficacy of antibiotics. Antibiotics are arguably the most important medical invention ever, and yet we use them so haphazardly and at such scale that we are throwing into doubt whether they will continue to be effective. This is a little-discussed facet of industrial animal farming in particular: we are jeopardizing our defence against superbugs so we can eat cheap chicken!

  • by deafpolygon on 12/25/22, 7:18 AM

    This is how the zombie apocalypse happens.