Soviet Doctors Cured Infections With Viruses, and Soon Yours Might Too Thank you Cecile Tamura, always great articles. In the Soviet Union, western antibiotics couldnt make it past the Iron Curtain. So Eastern Bloc doctors figured out how to use viruses to kill infectious bacteria. Now, with antibiotic-resistant bugs vexing doctors, that eerie yet effective method might come our way. In post-antibiotic world, infection cures you! The technique actually dates back thousands of years, in a very rudimentary form: people observed that the water from certain rivers could cure infectious diseases like leprosy and cholera. In the early 20th century, scientists figured out that these waters contained very specific types of viruses, which killed the bacteria that caused the infections. No bacteria, no infection. You already know this from high school biology (of course), but a virus works by injecting its DNA into a living cell, hijacking the cells replication machinery to make more viruses. When the cell cant hold all those replicated viruses any more, it explodes, releasing the baby viruses to continue the cycle again—and of course, killing the cell. Bacteriophages are a type of virus that targets, you guessed it, bacterial cells. Starting in the 1920s, scientists in both the U.S. and Georgia (the country, not the Peach State) began purifying bacteriophages and using them to treat bacterial infections. But right around WWII, western medicine latched on to the miraculous power of antibiotics, leaving the Soviet Union to perfect whats now called phage therapy. (Tip: pronounce phage to rhyme with rage. Or rhyme it with lodge if youre fancy.) Fast forward to today. Western medicines (over)reliance on antibiotics has led to the evolution of new superbugs that can resist even our most powerful bacteria killers. And as Nature reports, thats got researchers looking into phage therapy: In March, the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases listed phage therapy as one of seven prongs in its plan to combat antibiotic resistance. And at the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) meeting in Boston last month, Grégory Resch of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland presented plans for Phagoburn: the first large, multi-centre clinical trial of phage therapy for human infections, funded by the European Commission.
Posted on: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 10:54:17 +0000