This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Every 15 minutes, someone in the U.S. dies from a drug-resistant superbug. A few decades from now, antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections threaten to become the leading cause of death worldwide, outpacing cancer.
In the race for a solution to the antibiotic resistance crisis, a century-old practice is attracting renewed interest. The treatment, called phage therapy, involves co-opting friendly viruses that kill bacteria but ignore human cells. Bacteria can—and do—develop resistance to phages, just as they do with antibiotics.
But unlike antibiotics, phages can evolve counterdefenses of their own. Now, researchers at Michigan State University have identified a counterdefense used by a group of phages common in the human gut, called Enterobacteria phage T2, that helps them stay one step ahead of their bacterial hosts. These phages have mutation hotspots scattered throughout their genomes that help them modify key defense genes, the researchers report.
In a study published Aug. 13 in the journal Nature Microbiology, they show that these mutation hotspots help diversify their progeny to employ different survival strategies, ensuring that at least some continue to infect and kill no matter what countermeasures their bacterial hosts throw at them. "They're essentially hedging their bets," said co-author Chris Waters, a core faculty member in MSU's Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior program. "If we can harness these kinds of evolutionary tricks, we might be able to make more effective phage therapies in response to the antibiotic resistance crisis," Waters added.
The idea of using phages in medicine isn't new. Cocktails of phages have been used since the 1920s to treat dysentery, sepsis, pneumonia and other ailments, particularly in France, Poland and parts of the former Soviet Union. Interest in phage therapy waned in the West after the discovery of penicillin and other chemical antibiotics in the 1940s.
But now, with deadly microbes from MRSA to tuberculosis becoming resistant to more and more of these drugs, researchers are revisiting phage therapy to combat antibiotic-resistant infections. When phages invade, they latch onto a bacterium and inject their genes into the cell. Once inside, they hijack the bacterium's internal machinery and turn it into a virus factory, forcing their host to churn out new phages until the cell bursts and releases them.
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