With antibiotics losing their effectiveness, one company is turning to gene editing and bacteriophages -- viruses that infect bacteria -- to combat infections.
The global rise in antibiotic resistance is making bacterial infections harder to treat and increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness, and death. Once considered miracle drugs, antibiotics are now losing their effectiveness against ever-evolving bacteria. One company is aiming to treat infections with a different strategy: arming tiny viruses called bacteriophages with Crispr.
Known as phages for short, these viruses naturally infect and kill bacteria. Locus Biosciences of North Carolina is adding the gene-editing tool Crispr to the phages' armory to boost their killing ability. The company is testing the approach against urinary tract infections, or UTIs, caused by E. coli bacteria. Results from a small trial published in August suggest the experimental treatment has promise, but larger studies will be needed to confirm its benefits.
Phages exist everywhere that bacteria do, including sewers and soil, and there are thousands of different types. Whereas antibiotics kill bacteria indiscriminately -- including the beneficial kind -- phages have evolved to be selective in the strains or species of bacteria they target. This makes them an attractive alternative for treating infections.
In fact, phages were discovered more than 100 years ago and were used as medical treatments for a range of different infections in the early 20th century. But with the advent of antibiotics, phages fell out of use, except in the former Soviet Union, where antibiotics were not as accessible. Phage preparations were difficult to prepare, and scientists were skeptical about how well they worked.
Researchers are once again interested in phage therapy as the threat of antibiotic resistance grows. Often used in cases of chronic or life-threatening infections when antibiotics fail, scientists comb through collections of phages searching for ones that best match the problematic bacteria living inside a patient.