The Deadliest Being Could Save Us From Antibiotic Resistant Superbugs
- Samuel Goldberg
- Jan 19, 2025
- 3 min read
In the 1920s, scientists made a revolutionary discovery. One of the most powerful drugs known to man, believed to change the state of medicine and human health forever saving millions. This same drug you can now buy topically at any Walgreens or CVS for as trivial an injury as a paper cut. This drug is none other than the familiar antibiotic or its chemical name “penicillin”. This discovery was possibly the greatest medical breakthrough of the 20th century and became popularized in treatment of infection, surgical procedure and even industrial animal farming. While the use of antibiotics has helped revolutionize human health, there is a dark side of the increasing usage of this drug.
Our overuse of antibiotics has triggered a growing crisis in medicine known as antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Because bacteria are living beings, they have the capacity to evolve. With the overuse of antibiotics, bacteria have evolved to be resistant against our measures creating a phenomenon known as superbugs- bacteria resistant to antibiotic treatments. According to the World Health Organization, “antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the top global public health and development threats. It is estimated that bacterial AMR was directly responsible for 1.27 million global deaths in 2019 and contributed to 4.95 million deaths”. AMR could mean that the days where a minor cut or sniffle could kill you are no longer behind us.
However, there is a secret weapon that could save us from superbugs. This weapon is none other than the most abundant and deadliest beings on the planet. Bacteriophages are viruses that exclusively infect bacterial hosts. Bacteriophages have a head or capsid containing genomic material, and a tail which is uses to adsorb and infect its target bacteria. After entering target bacterial cells, bacteriophages can exhibit different life cycles: the lytic cycle, lysogenic cycle, and chronic infection. The lytic phages are most considered for phage therapy - in this life cycle the virus introduces its genome into a host cell initiating replication by hijacking the host's cellular metabolism to make new copies of the virus. This process is highly specific due to the binding receptors on the phage and bacterial cell, hence the bacterial pathogen must be properly identified and matched to its phage counterpart to pursue phage therapy. AI/ML tools could help scientists identify which phages would be suitable to treat pathogens isolated and sequenced from patients. Phage therapy can be broadly categorized into five types, namely, conventional therapy, modified phage therapy, therapy with enzymes derived from phages, therapy with proteins derived from phages, and combination therapy. Each therapy exhibits pros and cons but are viable options for treatment. It is notable that to avoid antibiotic resistance to the treatment phage therapy treatments should use a cocktail of phages so bacteria cannot evolve resistant to the phage treatment.
Historically, phage therapy has been explored in various soviet countries in the 1940s however in Western countries it did not gain much traction due to the lack of knowledge on phages, their specificity and inaccuracy and unreliability of phage trials. Compared to antibiotics this treatment was not appealing. However with the uptake of AMR and advances in AI/ML identification tools, phage therapy could become an effective and less invasive treatment for AMR infections. Recently, clinical studies have shown phage therapy to be about 70% effective when treating wounds or AMR infections and a success rate of 86.4% to treat bacterial respiratory tract infections. The key hurdles that phage therapy must overcome to become a viable treatment is the establishment and full identification of the genetic makeup and stability of the treatment cocktails such that the novel treatments can be approved by the FDA and properly administered for treatment. Companies like Novolytics Limited, Phico Therapeutics, and Biophage Pharma are actively developing phage products against S. aureus and could become our first widespread phage therapy treatment.
So is the deadliest killer our solution to AMR or will we return to the time where a cut could become our deadliest killer. Research trials, advancement of biotechnologies and time will tell but in the meantime, we must remain conscious of our usage of antibiotics before we use them into obsoleteness.
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