Engineered phages help teenager with antibiotic-resistant infection
statnews.com
statnews.com
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 :)
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.
"Ah that explains :("
?
That's a bit weird. People don't become resistant to antibiotics; the bacteria do.
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.
Wait, what? Have a link for the uninformed?
The closest I can get in the UK is the Parexel incident in 2006 where six men experienced a cytokine storm unexpectedly and were hospitalised as a result.
It sounds like the USSR was just not very good at producing its own antibiotics, so phage therapy remained popular there, as it wasn't any less effective than their poor quality antibiotics, which ended up causing resistance there before they did in the West. If you've managed to spur resistance, and you have persistent supply problems with your antibiotics, pushing forward with phage research makes a lot of sense.
http://discovermagazine.com/2017/oct/the-cold-wars--modern-r...
Well that's the thing — it's not new. It dates back to the 1920s. I heard about it years ago, so for physicians in late 2017 to watch for months as a patient with antibiotic-resistant infections declines and then to "send her home with palliative care" — that is just appallingly negligent.
Instead of blaming doctors (see below), we should praise the internet for allowing even these niche-topics to reach the masses.
Wikipedia gives a nice summary of the political aspects of why lots of doctors educated in the west never learned about it[2].
According to the same article, it became accessible to the average practitioner in the west only 4 years ago:
In June 2015 the European Medicines Agency hosted a one-day workshop [...] and in July 2015 the National Institutes of Health (USA) hosted a two-day workshop [...]
And that just means that the tickle-down of knowledge within the medical community started at that point.
Given that patients and their relatives are notorious for consulting google first and only then their doctors[3][4], I personally applaud the doctors for being so open minded to dig into the alternative treatment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy#History [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliava_Institute [3] Like the sales person turned manager who skimmed Wikipedia for programming related topics and then gives you detailed, nonsensical advice and questions your expertise when you roll your eyes, frantically searching for a nice way of saying "STFU, my BS-dector maxed out" ..... [4] https://twitter.com/DrPascalMeier/status/699202717030490112
After 9 months of decline: "It was at this point that the patient’s mother brought up the idea of phage therapy. Spencer didn’t know much about it, but there was a hospital microbiologist, Dr. James Soothill, who’d worked on the viruses and agreed to help."
So they had a microbiologist on staff who knew about phage therapy. They had a patient with a life threatening antibiotic resistant infection. It took them 9 months to connect the two, and it only happened because the patient's mother suggested it?
Sorry, but that is just completely messed up.
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.
No it isn't.
It's worth the time and effort to research conditions that affect you (or your family) and actively seek non-standard treatments that your doctors don't know about. Don't blindly trust their expertise.
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...
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.
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.
"How Ravenous Soviet Viruses Will Save the World"