Phage therapy or as a weapon against superbacteria

According to the latest issue of Nature Medicine, a British teenage girl with antibiotic-resistant infections was pulled back from the brink of death by a US-UK joint medical team using cocktail therapy consisting of three genetically modified viruses (bacteriophages). Isabel Hossawi, a 17-year-old British teenager, has a genetic disease of cystic fibrosis. By the summer of 2017, only one third of normal people had lung function. After lung transplantation, he almost died of intractable infection. After nine months of treatment at Greater Ormond Street Hospital in the United Kingdom, doctors believed that the survival rate was less than 1%. The doctor contacted Professor Graham Hartford, a molecular geneticist at the Howard Hughes Institute of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. They collaborated to develop a cocktail therapy using three bacteriophages that eventually miraculously rehabilitated Isabel and returned to school.

The bacteriophages used in cocktail therapy are viruses specially designed to attack and kill bacteria. Scientists selected three specific phages from more than 15,000 stored phages at the University of Pittsburgh and genetically engineered two of them to better attack bacteria. In June 2018, after safety tests, the team began injecting the mixture twice a day into Isabel's blood and smearing it on her skin. The treatment was incredibly successful. Six weeks later, Isabel's liver scan showed that the infection had basically disappeared and the skin ulceration had largely disappeared. At present, her treatment team is planning to add a fourth bacteriophage in an attempt to completely eradicate her infection. It is worth noting that the treatment of GM virus has little side effects on Isabel. Professor Hartfall said: "We didn't expect to be able to use these phages in actual treatment, which is a good result." Since Isabel's personalized treatment is not part of the clinical trial, it is not yet known how effective such treatment is for others. After all, finding the right specific bacteriophage for each patient is a huge challenge. In the future, scientists hope that it will be possible to search phage libraries automatically to identify and determine personalized treatment options. Some infectious strains, such as Staphylococcus aureus, which is a superbacteria gathered in hospitals, may be able to treat almost all cases by identifying only a few phages because all of these bacteria are genetically similar, thus improving the prospects of phage therapy as a conventional treatment.