4 ms·

I have never heard of bacteriophages before. Doing some light research, I found their protein/body structures to look almost machine-like. Very fascinating stuf

I have never heard of bacteriophages before. Doing some light research, I found their protein/body structures to look almost machine-like. Very fascinating stuff. From Wikipedia's Bacteriophage page: "Medical trials were carried out, but a basic lack of understanding of phages made these invalid". I seriously hope alternatives like bacteriophages are being revisited and reconsidered within the medical community, as it's obvious that conventional antibiotics are increasingly becoming less effective each year.

Tloewald 13y ago
Phages were the subject of one or two novels by Greg Bear. I often wonder when we might see more research in this area bearing fruit.
toufka 13y ago
Bacteriophages are very much the answer to the titular problem. Instead of finding tiny little lethal molecules, we will likely end up actually designing machine-like phages to kill the causes of our illnesses. They're easy to select for, quite good at what they do, and are some of the most approachable objects in synthetic biology, currently. And they are much more amenable to continued use than the 3 or 4 scaffoldings of antibiotics (small molecules) that we know of today.
- craigyk 13y ago
  The biggest problem with phages is they can be quite specific. Antibiotics put phage research out to pasture because a single, easy to mass produce small molecules were capable of wiping out enormous varieties of bacteria. With phages you'd need a large library to counter different bacteria, you'd have to successfully identify the bacteria which is causing the problem which may require culturing. If you wanted to maintain phage effectiveness in a heavily selected environment you'd also need to design phage "reactors" where the phages can be continually evolved against current bacterial populations.
  - toufka 13y ago
    Which in the long run is a far more elegant solution. Rather than "Kill All The Things!" (including your target), it's "Kill the Bad Guy!" - but you have to know who he was.
dekhn 13y ago
Phage were critically important in the early development of molecular biology. There was a whole club that met regularly around phages. Much of it was popularized by Delbruck. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_group
Fomite 13y ago
Phages have been, and are, being revisited and reconsidered. The early days of 'phage therapy' were pretty bad - because we really didn't understand what was going on, the "purified" phage solutions still had bits of bacterial cell membranes and the like in them, including endotoxins. People died. But phages were still being looked at for most of the antibiotic period, especially in countries without quite such widespread access to antibiotics. The Soviet Union had a very active program in Georgia, which was ongoing before the trouble there a few years back, I don't know the status of it now. It's a promising avenue, and there's some decisive advantages phages have over antibiotics. But it's also quite hard, and right now we lack a generalizable form of phage therapy - it tends to be a bespoke solution to specific intractable cases. But the incentives might increase as antibiotics become less and less effective. For awhile I wanted to work on phage research before I realized wet-lab Biology was not my forte.
- Ergomane 13y ago
  Even purified phages are not without possible side-effects. Several phages even encode for bacterial virulence factors such as exotoxins (stx, diphteria toxin). Fortunately, we are much better equipped in the molecular biology department to do research.
  - Fomite 13y ago
    Indeed. That was just a particular method of killing people, rather than an exhaustive list of them.

Tloewald 13y ago

Phages were the subject of one or two novels by Greg Bear. I often wonder when we might see more research in this area bearing fruit.

toufka 13y ago

Bacteriophages are very much the answer to the titular problem. Instead of finding tiny little lethal molecules, we will likely end up actually designing machine-like phages to kill the causes of our illnesses. They're easy to select for, quite good at what they do, and are some of the most approachable objects in synthetic biology, currently. And they are much more amenable to continued use than the 3 or 4 scaffoldings of antibiotics (small molecules) that we know of today.

craigyk 13y ago
The biggest problem with phages is they can be quite specific. Antibiotics put phage research out to pasture because a single, easy to mass produce small molecules were capable of wiping out enormous varieties of bacteria. With phages you'd need a large library to counter different bacteria, you'd have to successfully identify the bacteria which is causing the problem which may require culturing. If you wanted to maintain phage effectiveness in a heavily selected environment you'd also need to design phage "reactors" where the phages can be continually evolved against current bacterial populations.
- toufka 13y ago
  Which in the long run is a far more elegant solution. Rather than "Kill All The Things!" (including your target), it's "Kill the Bad Guy!" - but you have to know who he was.

dekhn 13y ago

Phage were critically important in the early development of molecular biology. There was a whole club that met regularly around phages. Much of it was popularized by Delbruck. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_group

Fomite 13y ago

Phages have been, and are, being revisited and reconsidered. The early days of 'phage therapy' were pretty bad - because we really didn't understand what was going on, the "purified" phage solutions still had bits of bacterial cell membranes and the like in them, including endotoxins. People died. But phages were still being looked at for most of the antibiotic period, especially in countries without quite such widespread access to antibiotics. The Soviet Union had a very active program in Georgia, which was ongoing before the trouble there a few years back, I don't know the status of it now. It's a promising avenue, and there's some decisive advantages phages have over antibiotics. But it's also quite hard, and right now we lack a generalizable form of phage therapy - it tends to be a bespoke solution to specific intractable cases. But the incentives might increase as antibiotics become less and less effective. For awhile I wanted to work on phage research before I realized wet-lab Biology was not my forte.

Ergomane 13y ago
Even purified phages are not without possible side-effects. Several phages even encode for bacterial virulence factors such as exotoxins (stx, diphteria toxin). Fortunately, we are much better equipped in the molecular biology department to do research.
- Fomite 13y ago
  Indeed. That was just a particular method of killing people, rather than an exhaustive list of them.