The History of Phage Therapy

The antibiotics series is over, but my supporters on Patreon got a bonus video all about the history of Neosporin. You can get access to exclusive videos, early access to future YT videos, and more by supporting me at www.patreon.com/corporis

Using viruses against superbugs sounds like using malware against scammers by sending it to their DM.

Look, us academics all know those papers get a little tedious. I appreciate an interlude of a turtle battle!!

My takeaway from this: scientists want to create nanobots to heal people, but we already have them.

Interesting enough in Russia phages are quite often used for curing pregnant women in child birth clinics as safe alternatives for antibiotics without any complications. There are preproduced cocktails of strains for many types of bacteria there - streptococcus, staphylococcus, even a supercoktails against intestine or std infections. And it works pretty well. I’m glad to know phage treatment idea becomes more popular.

"Be patient" I don't want to be a patient 😅

Putting a little Indian context here, there is a long held Indian belief that waters of the Ganga have healing properties. There’s mythological reasons for this, Ganga being the biggest river systems in the region and being a literal mythological Goddess eminating from the matted locks of Shiva from up the Himalayas. But I can’t help but wonder if there were observational anecdotal accounts over the centuries that solidified the belief in the magical healing properties of the waters.

So this might explains why some of the springs or even a well has some sort of healing properties in some folklores. They are literally teaming with bacteriophagies

Antibiotics vs Bacteriophage is such an awesome example of why (for many reasons) collaboration is our collective key to success. imagine if the west and east had followed the science and the knowledge together. You know, instead of playing the game of whos got the bigger nuke

There may not be a capitalistic model for Phage Therapy. There certainly is a Public Health model for their use.

Why you dont have a million subscribers yet is beyond me, I am not in the medical field at all and yet I find your videos fascinating and informative. Thanks for the great content.

As someone who is not supposed to take antibiotics for medical reasons, bacteriophages as treatment really excite me. I had to research them freshman year of undergrad, I watched a talk and the ones the presenter (Paul Turner, PhD) was discussing were really interesting. When applied to the target (antibiotic resistant) bacteria, they either killed them successfully or the bacteria developed resistance to the bacteriophages *and lost their antibiotic resistance*, in which case antibiotics could be used to kill them!

This is really interesting as someone who is currently trying to find new bacteriophages. I'm part of a research group in my college looking for phages in water sources, and I haven't been successful with my water sample but some others in the group have found evidence of phage activity.

I seriously appreciate the "D'Herelle Went Down to Georgia" gag. Generally amazing video as always Patrick!

Your antibiotic series deserves an award. Ive rewatched every episode multiple times

My friend with cystic fibrosis is getting bacteriophages for her because she has treatment refractory burkholderia cepacia in her lungs and its her last options. The technology is super cool.

I think AI actually may have some amount of use in this, simulating the interactions between bacteria and phages, even designing those custom phages for bacteria we have alot of data on. If used right, it could effectively eliminate that issue.

The Pioneer of phage therapy ignoring good science because of personal beef and having his lab taken away despite genuine innovation is excellent proof of how science is easily corrupted by human pettiness. I wonder what instances of these problems we have but don't know about today.

I think there's huge potential in bacteriophage therapy in the coming decades. The specificity was previously a major downside when it was difficult to determine exactly what was making somebody sick, but it's a tractable problem these days to perform fast-turnaround cultures and automated tests (including RNA/DNA testing to identify specific strains) to figure out what pathogen is in somebody and select an appropriate treatment from a prepared library. The technology for this simply didn't exist decades ago, so antibiotics won out. Nowadays, the selectivity of bacteriophages means they'd be well-tolerated and would be much less likely to wreak havoc on the rest of the microbiome when administered. Since bacteriophages can also evolve alongside their bacterial hosts (unlike antibiotics), there's more of a chance of keeping ahead of resistance, too.

Thank you I've been preaching this for over a decade but people think I'm just crazy because I'm not an actual doctor thank you for promoting this type of therapy