An alternative to antibiotics — the power of phage.
Phage are the most abundant organism on Earth, and amazingly, they kill 50% of all bacteria on the planet every 48 hours!
I just heard an update on the phage program from Sammy Farah and Craig Venter at SGI in La Jolla.
Phage are viruses that attack bacterial cells but not mammalian ones, exquisitely tuned to attack a specific host bacteria by rapid evolution.
From the Economist, reporting on SGI:
“Dr Farah and his colleagues, by contrast, are able to synthesise viruses from scratch, using off-the-shelf chemicals. They can thus design them precisely, down to the last atom.
These phages will be giant self-replicating drug molecules that automatically calibrate the size of their dose—for, when all of the target bacteria have been killed, they can no longer breed. The benefit, from the patient’s point of view, is help for an infection that is currently untreatable
Bacteria have their own immune systems that recognise and destroy viral genes. This leads to an arms race as the viral genes evolve to evade detection. Dr Farah thinks he can give his viruses a head start, slowing down the evolution of resistance.”
More: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3109452/
And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage
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