
Engineered phages help teenager with antibiotic-resistant infection - spking
https://www.statnews.com/2019/05/08/phage-therapy-how-genetically-engineered-viruses-may-have-prolonged-teens-life/
======
dang
Also
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-48199915](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-48199915),
via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867303](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867303).

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Insanity
They wrote "helped prolong the patients life" in some paragraphs. That kept
making me think that in the end the patient did die because of the infection
but it just took longer.

However, it appears that the patient is still alive today. That's quite the
achievement and opens up interesting ways of beating antibiotic resistance.

Interestingly and semi-related, one of my friends is resistant to antibiotics.
Apperantly in her country of origin you can get them pretty much like normal
medicine in the pharmacy. People use antibiotics for almost everything, and
she did not know about the possibility of developing resistance against it. It
was not even 'discovered' until she moved here (Western Europe).

Hopefully more countries will raise awareness around this issue. Because of my
bubble I thought everyone would be pretty much aware of it, but as with many
things, that was just my bubble :)

~~~
jdietrich
_> They wrote "helped prolong the patients life" in some paragraphs. That kept
making me think that in the end the patient did die because of the infection
but it just took longer._

The patient is alive and well, but her underlying illness (cystic fibrosis) is
life-limiting; most CF patients die before the age of fifty and this treatment
won't significantly change that life expectancy.

~~~
DiseasedBadger
Are you sure you didn't mean

"Ah that explains :("

?

~~~
Insanity
Pretty sure that was a reply to me instead of the current parent. Yes, :(
would have been more appropriate. I did not really think that much about the
smiley, and did not use it as a reflection of the fact but more as a
reflection on finding out the gap in my thinking.

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perilunar
Amazing story, but the fact that the patient’s mother had to suggest phage
therapy, and that the specialists didn't know much about it is pretty damning.

~~~
sterlind
Phage therapy is a blind spot for Western medicine. It's a new category of
drug, which means lots of work to get it through FDA or UK trials, and it's
not a single molecule - it's a process. There's little point to taking a
single combination of phages, packing them into a pill and ramming it through
the clinical trials process - it'll be way too specific to be worth it.

Instead, the entire pipeline - keeping a library of bacteriophages, testing
them for efficacy against samples, modifying them for increased virulence,
screening for safety - needs to be approved, and run for each patient.

That's too experimental for the FDA, and the FDA is too rigid to allow
approval for such pipelines (except in rare cases, like CAR-T immunotherapy.)
Plus the UK has that anti-gene therapy law because of a disastrous adenovirus
trial that killed six healthy volunteers.

The West is too risk-averse and conservative to make the big bureaucratic
changes to allow this. Russia had no such hangups, which is why phage therapy
flourished there.

~~~
altfredd
> Phage therapy is a blind spot for Western medicine. It's a new category of
> drug

It is a branch of traditional medicine, approximately 100000 years old and
counting.

"Western medicine" ignores phage therapy, because growing a bunch of mud in a
bowl does not bring anyone 10000% cuts. Cultivating phages still requires
labor and equipment, and can be quite profitable, just not 10000% profitable,
— because pretty much anyone can do it.

~~~
jdietrich
Antibiotics aren't commercially valuable, which is a critical problem - drug
companies have no interest in developing new antibiotics, because they won't
see a return on their investment. This is one area of medicine where the
problem isn't drug company profiteering, but the lack of profit.

[https://www.idsociety.org/10x20/](https://www.idsociety.org/10x20/)

~~~
Whack-kneed
Perhaps not, but the market for industrial antibiotics in everything from
cattle-feed to shredded-cheese is huge and begs if not deservesdeserves to be
taxed to make page therapy economically feasible. Unless you have another
approach to fighting antibiotic resistant infections.

------
_bxg1
Playing the part of the optimist, I think we'll always be able to outsmart our
ailments in the long run. It's startling to see an arms race start with
antibiotics, because we've been winning in that arena with very little effort
for over a century, but having to get creative again and being totally
helpless against a coming apocalypse are two different things.

~~~
iso1337
Able to? Yes.

Willing to? Not as much.

Just consider the following: 1) it’s been so long since people have first hand
witness of the horrors of smallpox, polio, etc. So long that anti-vax is alive
and well in affluent, educated enclaves. 2) antibiotics are not profitable.
Achaogen tried but the business case just wasn’t there.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-03/antibioti...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-03/antibiotics-
aren-t-profitable-enough-for-big-pharma-to-make-more)

So I agree with your last statement that we at not totally helpless, but I do
think (as with global climate change or deferred maintenance on levees) there
has to be an immediate and pressing need for people to put their money and
actions in the right place.

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sena
Also a nice informative video on bacteriophage from Kurzgesagt:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg)

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Amygaz
And then the endogenous CRISPR system will take care of making bacteria
resistant to the engineered phages, because that’s what it naturally does, and
we will be in another arm race.

Eventually, mentalities around antibiotic used will have to changes: we have
to use antibiotics only when necessary; we need to stop trusting that people
will take their antibiotics properly and completely; we need to start using
so-called “last-resort” antibiotics a lot sooner in the process.

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m463
I've wondered if phages would ever come into the spotlight ever since I read
this article about 15 years ago:

"How Ravenous Soviet Viruses Will Save the World"

[https://www.wired.com/2003/10/phages](https://www.wired.com/2003/10/phages)

------
yegle
A short video on Phage from Motherboard:
[https://youtu.be/aVTOr7Nq2SM](https://youtu.be/aVTOr7Nq2SM)

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phront
Realy great result but may it be a major step towards z apocalypse if
something goes wrong?

