
Couple turns to viruses to beat back superbug - rhschan
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/phage-therapy-1.4090666
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notadoc
Phage therapy is often effective and very promising, but it's specific to each
infection, labor intensive, and basically impossible to scale up or patent to
mass produce like an antibiotic is (perhaps why it hasn't caught on).

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

Most of the ongoing active use and research is in Poland

[https://www.iitd.pan.wroc.pl/en/OTF/](https://www.iitd.pan.wroc.pl/en/OTF/)

~~~
ddingus
It can scale in distributed fashion. The labor is fine. People working to save
people is a completely valid labor, important, meaningful, possible.

It's not like we don't have any free human time. Lots of people need work.

Packaging this into a repeatable, portable process seems worthwhile.

The search for better super antibiotics can continue. If we get lucky, great.

I read there is a group in Poland who will match a phage to an infection in a
few days. They need a sample.

Scale that. The world needs it.

~~~
leereeves
> basically impossible to scale up or patent to mass produce like an
> antibiotic is (perhaps why it hasn't caught on).

I think they mean that the profit motive of pharma giants is an important part
of promoting new treatments.

~~~
DonaldFisk
There wouldn't any profit for pharma giants. You can't patent bacteriophage,
they're the commonest life form on Earth (if you consider viruses to be a life
form), they're extracted from unwanted waste (raw sewage) and they reproduce
themselves in bacterial cultures.

This is why their use continued in the Soviet Union when they fell out of
favour in the West. Profits don't matter under communism.

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sandworm101
It's great having friends in the right places. Why in these stories is the
patient always a researcher or married to a researcher in the field? People
die of infections like this every day in every hospital. If i demand of my
dieing grandmother's doctor "phone the CDC and let's try some phages" i'd be
laughed out of the room. One is left with the distinct impression that, end of
life or not, those in the club are provided extreem options the rest of us are
not. (See many of the ebola stories.) They may be totally experimental but
facing the end most would take experimental over nothing.

~~~
nonbel
You do not really understand what "experimental treatment" means without doing
medical research. In general, it means it is extremely more likely to acutely
hurt more than it helps you. I mean like million to one odds.

~~~
phkahler
But for some reason doctors and researchers are viewed as understanding that
better than the public. But they're still happy to tell a wife that they might
want to call a priest for her husband in a comma...

~~~
Turing_Machine
"But for some reason doctors and researchers are viewed as understanding that
better than the public."

Wait: you're arguing that doctors and researchers _don 't_ understand the
risks of experimental treatments better than the general public?

Why would you think that?

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vmarsy
I found the original article that the CBC writer based this story on more
interesting and entertaining. I submitted it on HN a couple days ago:
[http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/sd-me-
bacter...](http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/sd-me-bacteria-
virus-20170426-story.html)

~~~
inetknght
jfc that site is laden with shitware for your browser

------
tener
> Bacteriophages were once used as a treatment in the U.S. and Europe, but
> when penicillin came to the market in the 1950s, their use was largely
> abandoned outside of Russia and Poland.

I wonder what insights into safety of those therapies doctors in Russia and
Poland have to offer.

~~~
frenchy
I believe the general problem with bacterial viruses, is that our body mounts
a immune response against them.[1] It works okay for a little bit, but because
our immune system "learns" (e.g. clonal selection) the second time they are
used they aren't usually effective.

I've read that they kept being used in Russia because Russia didn't have the
industrial capacity for antibiotic production & refinement. It would be
interesting to know if the Russian/Polish medical communities learned anything
novel about bacterial viruses though.

[1] Our immune system doesn't know that they're harmless, and the tricks that
some viruses use to avoid are immune system are typically harmful to us, so
you wouldn't want to use those ones.

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justinjlynn
The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy -- no more and no less. That fact is
gravely important to remember and often forgotten to great detriment.

~~~
penpapersw
It kind of sounds like you have a very specific context in mind when you say
this. Mind explaining?

~~~
justinjlynn
Not at all. What I mean to imply is that simply because someone or something
aids one in the fight against another doesn't mean that that particular
someone or something is friendly towards one. At best, one can infer that, at
least for the moment, one isn't that person or thing's most valuable target at
the time of aid. It might be a cynical way of looking at things but it helps
to distinguish between that which is actually your friend, knowingly
sacrificing something of itself for one, and your temporary and unwitting ally
ready to turn on one the moment the, by chance or strategy, existing target is
eliminated.

To elaborate, the situation described in the article is a case report. In this
case, the gamble paid off and the man was cured. However, we rarely hear about
the cases in which this gamble was lost and the experimental treatment did
_not_ result in a successful return to health. It's human to want to belong
and to have others come to our aid. Sadly, it's also human to be thanking the
cat for killing mice one day and then cursing it for eating our goldfish the
next.

~~~
penpapersw
Right. But that's implied by the fact that the phrase exists.

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caycep
given that the expertise to manufacture and program viruses has matured quite
rapidly over the past decade, i think we may look at them not as an "enemy"
but more of a tool, i.e. a cellular syringe to be manipulated at will. Why
most ppl in that field call them "vectors" these days.

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sstevenshang
This feels like an episode of House MD.

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mkevac
Phages are being used in Russia. Right now two types of phages are sitting in
my fridge.

~~~
snowpanda
Can you expand on how they are being used? I'd love to know.

~~~
mkevac
Doctors routinely prescribe phages when they think that antibiotics would be
an overkill or if they don't want any side effects from antibiotics.

Here is the list of phages that are sold in Russian pharmacies:
[https://imgur.com/a/vkEJo](https://imgur.com/a/vkEJo)

