The Virtuous Side of Viruses

As drug-resistant superbugs spread, researchers are turning to microbes that kill bacteria

Credit: Fatinha RamosAdvertisement

This year the world awakened to the fact that the most powerful and sophisticated species on earth is tragically vulnerable to the tiniest and most basic of creatures. Infectious disease specialists have been warning about this for decades. And the threat comes not only from novel viruses, such as the one causing COVID-19, that jump from animals to humans but also from microbial monsters that we have helped to create through our cavalier use of antibiotics: treatment-resistant bacteria such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, sometimes dubbed “Iraqibacter” because so many soldiers returning from Iraq were infected with it. The World Health Organization has predicted that deaths from resistant “superbugs” will rise from roughly 700,000 a year today to nearly 10 million by 2050.

But in a splendid irony, it may turn out that viruses, so often seen as nemeses, could be our saviors in fighting a host of killer infections. As the threat from drug-resistant bacteria has grown and the development of new antibiotics has stalled, researchers have turned their attention to bacteriophages—literally, bacteria eaters. Viruses in this class are believed to be the oldest and most numerous organisms on earth. And like guided missiles, each type has evolved to seek and destroy a specific type of bacteria. Phage therapy has long been used in eastern Europe to battle infections, but after modern antibiotics arrived in the 1940s, it was largely ignored. Interest began to pick up in this century “because the resistance issue was getting worse and worse,” says Vincent Fischetti, who heads the laboratory of bacterial pathogenesis and immunology at the Rockefeller University. With modern techniques, virologists can precisely match just the right phages to a specific strain of superbug—with sometimes astonishing results.

Source