Doctors are looking to an experimental treatment for help

As living organisms, bacteria are encoded by DNA, and DNA occasionally mutates. Sometimes genetic mutations render a bacterium immune to an antibiotic’s chemical tactics. The few cells that might escape antibiotic pressure then have a sudden advantage: with their counterparts wiped out, resources abound, and the remaining antibiotic-resistant bacteria proliferate. It’s a problem not only for the host—you or me when we are treated with an antibiotic and develop a resistant strain—but also for anyone with whom we happen to share our resistant bacteria, say, on a door handle or keyboard. In fact, most resistant bacteria develop not in people but in livestock fed antibiotics to promote growth; these resistant bacteria infect people through contaminated animal products. This is how even antibiotic “naive” people come to be infected with resistant strains of bacteria.

I see this all the time as a family doctor. A woman has a urinary tract infection. I tell her that her bacteria are resistant to this or that antibiotic, and she says, “But I’ve never taken any of those.” Welcome to the global human soup.

  • girlfreddyOP
    6·
    8 months ago

    The article deals with that.

    Greg German, a medical microbiologist at Unity Health Toronto, has collaborated at times with Nancy Tawil, a biomedical engineer with experience in phage production for the US-based company Precisio Biotix Therapeutics and as CEO of Qeen BioTherapeutics based in Gatineau, Quebec. For years, her production teams have been collecting libraries of phages from all over the world that infect and kill common human pathogens, such as Staphylococcus, Pseudomonas, Klebsiella, and Acinetobacter, all of which can cause life-threatening lung, brain, and blood infections. To date, most of Tawil’s research has been done on patients in the US. Qeen receives a sample of infected tissue, isolates the bacteria, screens its library for an effective phage—usually a cocktail of up to five phages—then ferments, multiplies, and purifies the phages, and delivers the mixture to the clinical team. That process takes between a week and two weeks. The price tag? About $45,000. According to Tawil, that’s the cost of making 200 litres of phage solution, whereas a patient might need only fifty millilitres for their treatment. Sometimes a phage found for one person can also work on another, reducing the cost of treatment per person.