
Using a virus to kill what antibiotics can’t - okket
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/researchers-treat-lung-infections-in-mice-with-bacteria-killing-viruses/
======
amingilani
Relevant Kurzgesagt video explaining _everything_ about bacteriophage[1]. I
posted this a while ago, but since it's a video it didn't get much attention.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg)

~~~
ArtWomb
Actual movies of phage infection will soon be visualized using Cryo-EM
resolution techniques ;)

------
wycs
They have been used for almost a 100 years in Russia with great efficiency.
Our inability to use phage therapy here is due to terrible incentives created
by intellectual “property” laws and regulations that assume standardized
treatmentments.

~~~
Fomite
It's not just regulation. They're also _not very good_ \- there's a reason
antibiotics won (we used to use phage in the West too - they developed a
dangerous reputation because we weren't good at purification). Russia used
them because antibiotic availability was constrained.

A post on this from a day or so ago, my usual take on phage, from the
standpoint of someone who works in healthcare epidemiology and has always been
fond of phage therapy:

1) Even with resistance on the rise, we still have antibiotics that work.
Phage therapy is a "someday we're going to need this...we think" type
treatment.

2) There's no such thing as a "broad spectrum" phage. They're organism
specific, and that means not only would you need to keep a phage library on
hand, but you'd have to do a lot of diagnostic tests. That's going to be both
expensive and tricky.

3) Phages are living things. Not only is that a weird regulatory framework to
be in for a drug, but it also means that you need to be able to keep phage
alive. In contrast, antibiotics are inert.

4) Phage therapy is also relatively new in the West, which means there's just
less of a R&D infrastructure behind it.

There have been people working on commercializing phage therapy since I was in
undergrad (I'm now a tenure-track professor). The problem is it's hard, and
antibiotics are so much better as a treatment that there's kind of a ceiling
on the excitement that they can generate.

~~~
samatman
3) is not the best way to think about it.

Viruses are more like a delicate molecule than like a living thing, because
they don't have a metabolism. Kept in the proper conditions they last
indefinitely.

"more like" in this context. "Are viruses alive" is the most popular thread in
bio-ontology, locked by the moderator after 12,493 pages of heated debate.

~~~
Fomite
I chose "alive" because, well, HN is not always _the best_ at biological
nuance.

But there's a few major concerns:

1\. Most preparations are bespoke. The FDA has made some headway with this
because of fecal transplants, but it's still a problem.

2\. Phages evolve. That's one of the benefits of them. Generally speaking,
self-adaptive medications are not something we have a good regulatory context
for.

3\. They need culturing, isolation, identification, etc. and those are "wet
lab" things.

------
vagab0nd
I've been thinking recently, that we learned about both phage and crispr from
the war between viruses and bacteria. This is amazing to me. It's like the
earth is running a genetic algorithm from which we can copy code. What else
can we learn?

Also, what other exciting front in biotech should I know about?

------
m031
I found this documentary interesting :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVTOr7Nq2SM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVTOr7Nq2SM)

~~~
agumonkey
I'm shocked. This could have saved people and has been forgotten due to
economic structures.

------
erikb
This sounds like a brilliant idea that will either bring humanity to a new
positive level or kill us all. Great times.

------
RobertRoberts
What is wrong with white blood cells [0] and T cells [1] and the already
existing immune system?

This is the equivalent of "roll your own encryption" in the computer security
world.

The number of real world cases where people have no or little immune system is
likely minuscule (real numbers?) compared to the number of people that destroy
their immune system through poor life and health choices. (obviously high
number)

Eat better, exercise some (any?) and let your immune system take care of this
stuff. That is what it's there for. Introducing _another_ foreign substance
that will need to be fought off later is a recipe for disaster.[2]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_blood_cell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_blood_cell)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_cell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_cell)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/King-Mice-Cheese-Nancy-
Gurney/dp/0394...](https://www.amazon.com/King-Mice-Cheese-Nancy-
Gurney/dp/0394800397)

~~~
andai
I'm wondering now, what makes immune systems fail? In other words, if our only
option were to help immune cells do their job (instead of doing it for them),
where would we start?

~~~
rincebrain
I mean, we do have active research and treatment vectors involving this, but
it's tricky for a few reasons.

One of the nasty ones is that accidentally teaching the immune system to
attack the wrong thing is catastrophic, and we don't really have good general
ways to undo learned response once present. (Exposure/desensitization therapy
works for some things, but is still relatively early in its refinement.) Just
look at the fun with the lone star tick and induced red meat allergies, and
that's apparently a purely incidental outcome (e.g. it's not obviously a
beneficial part of the tick's outcomes from biting things, just a quirk of
primate biology not possessing a protein that every other mammal does, and
getting upset when it finds it in the bloodstream).

Another example that comes to mind of when this doesn't "just work" is
culturing uninfected immune cells from HIV+ patients, teaching them to kill
HIV, and then putting them back.

AIUI, this works for a little while, but then it just shows back up again,
like it never left. As it turns out, T cells happily share information between
each other by making a happy little bridge between the two cells, and HIV is
perfectly capable of spreading that way. Womp womp.

If you want to see a really strange immune outcome, go read the recent
experiments about graft-versus-host disease potentially wiping out HIV in
patients. (It didn't work for two patients in one experiment, so not extremely
hopeful about the outcome, but it's a fascinating complex interaction. [1] [2]

[1] - [https://www.nature.com/news/hopes-of-hiv-cure-in-boston-
pati...](https://www.nature.com/news/hopes-of-hiv-cure-in-boston-patients-
dashed-1.14324)

[2] -
[https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431244-400-immune-w...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431244-400-immune-
war-with-donor-cells-after-transplant-may-wipe-out-hiv/)

~~~
RobertRoberts
What do I know? I am a random person voicing my opinion on the internet. Read
my other comments, I will freely admit when I am wrong.

If they make something that helps you, I think that would be great.

~~~
RobertRoberts
error: the parent comment was for a previous post... oops.

