Antibiotics have long been the go-to treatment for various infections. Still, almost as soon as the treatment was discovered in 1945, widespread use led to the rise of a new problem: antibiotic resistance.
Simply put, antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria evolve to evade antibiotics, rendering the drug useless.
In April 2014, the World Health Organization declared antibiotic resistance a serious global threat to public health. In 2024, the University of Oxford published a study that found 1.4 million deaths were related to antibiotic resistance that year alone.
Now, researchers at the University of California San Diego are developing alternatives for antibiotics to combat bacteria.
One answer is bacteriophages, part of a project that has been ongoing for almost three years.
Research is being led by Dr. David T. Pride, a professor of pathology at UC San Diego School of Medicine. The publication of this new research could become a powerful tool to push back on the global crisis, according to the university.
“There’s a problem right now with antibiotic resistance… not just in the U.S. but we see it all across the world,” Pride said. “It’s gotten to the point that as physicians and scientists, we need to be searching for other answers, and one of those answers is to find a different way to kill the bacteria that make us sick.”
The bacteriophages, called phages for short, are a form of virus that infects and kills bacteria and only replicates in bacteria cells. The treatment has actually been around for more than a century, but they are notorious for being picky assassins and only attacking certain strains of bacteria.
The research team at UCSD, however, put phages and bacteria in the same arena together for 30 days. The phages learned and adapted to the bacteria it was meant to attack.
Scientifically, this technique is known as “experimental evolution,” which allowed the phages to evolve in a lab-controlled environment to treat a common bacterium, Klebsiella pneumoniae. K. pneumoniae is known to be drug-resistant, and is the bacterium behind common — and sometimes fatal — illnesses such as pneumonia, sepsis and meningitis.
“There are a lot of people who are skeptical about the idea of putting a bacteriophage or virus into a person to make them healthy,” Pride said. “But we’re doing this with a bunch of different organisms, and I think the proof is going to be in the pudding. It’s pretty clear that this is going to work on a number of different organisms.”
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