Eli5 what are phages (the medical alternative to antibiotics) and how do they work?
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Phages are viruses that specifically attack bacteria. The ones I’m familiar with almost look like little rocket ships with legs, which they use to attach to the bacteria. They “inject” their genes (rna/dna) and hijack the bacteria’s machinery to make more bacteriophages similar to how other viruses work.
Main benefit over antibiotics being that bacteriophages have been locked in an evolutionary cat and mouse game for a long, long time…so when bacteria develop resistance, bacteriophages can adapt.
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Phage is short for bacteriophage. A bacteriophage is a virus that infects bacterial cells but not cells of multicellular organisms. In other words, if you have a bacterial infection, bacteriophages can kill the bacterial infection without making you sick. One of the advantages of phage therapy is that they can bypass antiobiotic resistance and kill infections caused by organisms that are resistant to antiobotics. They also typically don’t cause the common unpleasant side effects of antibiotics.
The downsides are that bacteriophages are very specific, so you need the exact right bacteriophage to target the specific bacteria infecting you, as opposed to some antibiotics which can kill a wide variety of bacteria. They’re also difficult to make in sufficient quantities for widespread use, they can take longer to work than antibiotics, and while they can’t make you sick directly, they might still trigger an undesirable immune response.
Short for bacteriophages. They’re viruses that can dock to bacteria to inject DNA or RNA to kill the bacterial (and reproduce more phages). The DNA/RNA are instructions to take over the bacteria’s cellular machinery to produce more phages, at which point it produces a ton of them, blows up (this is how it dies), and spreads more phages to attack other bacteria to repeat the process.
When I learned about these as a kid, I thought it was like a starship docking vessel that attached to main ships and sent in troops to take it over to produce more small docking vessels. I watched and played too many Star Wars games…
Sometimes you can keep the phage body and load in different RNA/DNA instructions. Pretty cool stuff. Maybe one day we can use it to treat cancer since phages can be retro-fitted to attach only cancer cells and not our own (with DNA/RNA instructions to only kill cancer cells).
Viruses that target a specific bacteria, basically. The reason we don’t use them is because A) they’re too specific (each phage kills a specific species of bacteria, antibiotics on the other hand are more broad) and B) Phages are harder to identify, isolate and produce more of them.
However due to antibiotic resistant pathogens scientists are starting to look into them again.
Good podcast episode recently (from the Economist) that covers phages and their potential to treat antibiotic resistant bacteria. Even follows a Canadian patient to a clinic in (former Soviet republic) Georgia, where phage therapy is not uncommon.
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYWNhc3QuY29tL3RoZWVjb25vbWlzdGFsbGF1ZGlv/episode/NjQ2NTEwNTk3NDk5MGIwMDExZWJmZGRl?ep=14
“phage” is short for “bacteriophage” – a virus that infects (and kills) bacteria. They work like other viruses: they float around until they stick to a bacterial cell and get their genetic material into the cell. The cell then makes lots of copies of the virus genetic material and proteins until it bursts and spills virus out.
It’s not a great alternative to antibiotics since phage cleaned up by our immune system it’s hard to get enough into an infection to be useful.
Thank you everyone
I feel like I can wrap my head around it now!
About 150 years ago, a guy named Augustus de Morgan gave the perfect answer.
“Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum. And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on; While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.”
Phages are the lesser fleas that bite bacteria.
Phages, or bacteriophages (“bacteria eaters”), are viruses that attack bacteria. They tend to be very specific about what they infect, so you can send them into the body and they will only take out the thing you want them to kill. Antibiotic resistance doesn’t help bacteria against phages, and sometimes the genetic mutations that let them resist our drugs will cause them to be even weaker to phages, which is why phage therapy can be great for drug-resistant bacteria.
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