Thursday, February 19, 2015

Could drinking viruses make us healthier?


If someone told you to drink a cocktail of viruses, would you do it? What if that someone wasn’t just anyone, but your doctor? Although these questions appear hypothetical, they are quickly becoming a reality. Healthcare is on the verge of a new era: the post-antibiotic era. An article from Bloomberg Business describes this current state as a “drug drought,” since no new major class of antibiotics has been developed in the last 30 years. This lack of innovation would not be so problematic if our old antibiotics were still working. However, the overuse of antibiotics has placed selective pressure on bacteria to evolve resistance strategies, making our antibiotics ineffective. In the face of this drug drought, we are left with two choices: to create novel antibiotics, or to abandon antibiotics altogether.

As an alternative to antibiotics, certain desperate patients are ordering vials of viruses from the Republic of Georgia and Russia, where a treatment known as “phage therapy” is federally approved. Bacteriophages, or phages for short, are viruses that infect specific bacteria and take over their cellular machinery, eventually killing the bacterium. These viruses are highly specialized; introducing them into human systems would not jeopardize nonbacterial cells. Additionally, since there are more viruses on Earth than any living creature, it is likely that phage therapy would be an affordable treatment. However, the cost of research might not be as low as it would seem: the specificity of phage infection demands that a unique virus be paired up with each bacterial infection. While considering the feasibility of using phage therapy in place of antibiotics, we must analyze this tradeoff between accessibility and specificity.

No comments:

Post a Comment