SuperbugsNature’s remedies: Using viruses against drug-resistant bacteria

Published 26 June 2018

With microbial resistance to antibiotics growing into a major global health crisis, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, in collaboration with national research institutions and private industry, are leveraging hard-won expertise to exploit a natural viral enemy of pathogenic bacteria, creating North America’s first Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH). The plan is to use viruses as new weapon against multidrug-resistant bacteria.

With microbial resistance to antibiotics growing into a major global health crisis, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, in collaboration with national research institutions and private industry, are leveraging hard-won expertise to exploit a natural viral enemy of pathogenic bacteria, creating North America’s first Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH).

Bacteriophages, or phages, are viruses that specifically target and consume bacteria. They are ubiquitous, found wherever bacteria exist and were once considered a promising therapeutic tool. The advent of modern antibiotics in the 1930s redirected research interests, but with 10 million people estimated to die from “superbug” infections by 2050, they are getting a second look.

In 2016, UC San Diego School of Medicine physicians and scientists conducted a dramatic, last-ditch effort to save the life of Tom Patterson, then a 69-year-old professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine who had become systemically infected by a multidrug-resistant bacterium during a vacation in the Middle East.

Comatose and dying, a team that included experts from UC San Diego, the U.S. Navy, Texas A&M University, San Diego State University and private industry developed experimental cocktails of bacteriophages to treat Patterson. The approach worked; Patterson awoke within days and fully recovered. UCSD says that he was the first U.S. patient with a systemic multidrug-resistant bacterial infection to be successfully treated intravenously with bacteriophages. In the two years since, physicians at UC San Diego Health have treated five other patients with phages for bacterial infections under emergency investigational new drug approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

“All of the patients tolerated phage therapy well without adverse effects,” said Saima Aslam, MD, associate professor of medicine and medical director of the solid organ transplant infectious diseases service at UC San Diego Health. “Phage combinations were given by direct instillation into the infected site, intravenously and/or by inhaled routes. This led to resolution of infection in three cases. In two others, it helped ameliorate the infection. In one case, treatment came too late in the course of infection and the patient was transitioned to hospice.”

Encouraged by the broadly positive results observed in these first patients, UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla has announced a three-year, $1.2 million grant to help launch the center.