Is this the end to antibiotic resistance? MIT scientists create viruses that kill the hardest-to-treat E. coli superbugs
- Antibiotic resistance is among the leading threats to global health, according to the World Health Organization
- As many as 23,000 Americans die from superbug infections a year
- Scientists are working with viruses that hunt bacteria to design a new form of treatment for the most stubborn and deadly infections
- MIT researchers created a virus that can easily be tweaked to kill several resistant strains of E. coli
Scientists have developed weapon in the fight against antibiotic resistance: viruses that can kill E. coli superbugs.
The World Health Organization (WHO) considers antibiotic resistance – the rise of bacteria that don’t respond to the drugs – a top threat to global health.
Any germ can mutate and render antibiotics ineffective, and antibiotic resistance is already ‘widespread’ in the form of E. coli that causes some urinary tract infections, according to the WHO.
Bacteria-eating viruses, or bacteriophages, are being studied in the hopes they could be programmed to pick up where antibiotic effectiveness falls off.
Now, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists have engineered these viruses to work alongside antibiotics to kill off E. coli.
Antibiotic resistant infections kill some 23,000 Americans a year, and many are resistant to all drugs. MIT scientists have now designed a virus that they can tweak to target several E. coli superbugs – and potentially other infections, too (file)
Antibiotics transformed modern medicine, turning infections that were once almost uniformly fatal to ones that could be treated in as little as a few days.
But just s we learned to outsmart bacteria, bacteria has, in its way learned to outsmart our medicines.
Even within a single species of bacteria, there is variation.
And when antibiotics accurately target and kill off the majority of bacteria in an infection, the ones left – the ones that were slightly different from most – multiply, and become more prevalent.
The antibiotics are a poor match for these mutant bacteria, which continue to survive and multiply.
As more bacteria are exposed to antibiotics, the effect is a sort of ‘survival of the fittest’: increasingly, the bacteria strains left and spreading are the ones that are immune to antibiotics.
So over-prescribing antibiotics only drives up the rate of resistance.
And some infections even become resistant to all antibiotics – a death sentence.
The result is that at least two million Americans develop antibiotic resistant infections every year, and at least 23,000 of them die.
Scientists have been unable to develop new antibiotics fast enough to keep up with the mutations of bacteria.
And even if they could, these new drugs would just face the same problem all over again.
So researchers are in search of a novel method for treating these deadly infections.
One such method is the use of bacteriophages – viruses whose name, in Greek, means ‘to devour bacteria.’
Each particular bacteriophage has a taste for a particular bacterium.
So researchers have been studying them with growing interest to see if they can be programmed to attack the bacteria that antibiotics cannot.
The MIT programmed theirs to go after drug-resistant E. coli.
They created a ‘scaffold,’ of framework for the virus that they can effectively plug different genes into to program it to attack specific bacteria.
‘We think phages are a good toolkit for killing and knocking down bacteria levels inside a complex ecosystem, but in a targeted way,’ said lead study author Dr Timothy Lu, a biological engineer.
Out of 10,000 different phages that Dr Lu and his team created, they found several of their new viruses could kill even mutated, antibiotic resistant E. coli.
‘This is just the beginning, as there are many other viral scaffolds and bacteria to target,’ said Dr Kevin Yehl, a postdoc fellow in the MIT lab and study co-lead author.
