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Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

Anybody here on HN involved in phage research?

As far as I understand, viruses tend to be only resistant in one direction: either antibiotics or phages, but they can't be resistant to both.

In the 2010s there were a lot of public talks at the DKFZ (German cancer research center) where research teams were looking for getting more attention and funds for that area, but I have no clue what happened to that.

Sars-cov-2 was kind of the prime example of a virus that you can't beat with antibiotics, so I was assuming that every pharma company would now direct their research at bacteriophage research...but there's not much information about it as far as I can tell.

Anyone have some interesting papers on that?

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Phage is short for bacteriophage. They are viruses that attack bacteria. As far as I know there are not viruses that target other viruses, except as a side effect - the viral life cycle is dependent on a host, and a coronavirus has little to offer a bacteriophage. Similarly, antibiotics target bacteria, not viruses. Antivirals often have very different mechanisms of action.

Well described.

There are viruses which affect other viruses with arguably more than a side effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virophage ), but for natural reasons it seems a bit off from fully analogous to bacteriophages.

Coronaviruses are at the high end of size and complexity among RNA-viruses, but it's still hard for me to see that virophages would be relevant to combat SARS-CoV-2.

I am not involved with phage research.

However, antibiotics do not work on viruses.

I believe you mean bacterial infections, which seem to either evolve protections against antibiotics or protections against bacteriophages, but not both.

I have a couple years of phage research. Unfortunately we haven't really seen phage-attacking viruses yet. I know the "first known virovore" made its rounds here a while back, but in the case of a phage attacking another virus, neither really has a "metabolism" to exploit.

Your point about bacterial resistance to antibiotics vs phages is almost correct; increasing resistance against one attack broadly tends to decrease efficacy defending against the other, though as I am not familiar with the mechanisms for this, my uninformed hypothesis would be that the gene expression required comes at a high price - you can't defend against antibiotics and phage and outcompete your Petri-dishmates.

I suspect that for the future, medicine will be antibiotics in combination with phage cocktails of several phage strains that sabotage in different ways (targeting capsular polysaccharides vs surface proteins vs flagella, for example), to prevent a repeat of antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotics don't work on viruses, so maybe you should start you research there.

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