Personalized Phage Therapy Heals Cat With Deadly Bacterial Infection

A persistent infection in a pet cat’s leg after a compound fracture was repaired has finally been cured using cutting-edge experimental medicine: personalized bacteriophage therapy.

© by GrrlScientist for Forbes | LinkTr.ee

Pet Siamese cat, Squeaks, relaxes after making a full recovery, thanks to personalized phage therapy. (Credit: Milat and Larry Berkley.)

What do you think of when you hear the word “virus”? Perhaps the common cold, or the “bird flu” virus, which is making headlines daily, or perhaps the global coronavirus pandemic that we are living in right now.

Although viruses can be found in every ecosystem on the planet and can infect every species alive, most people think of them as solely causing deadly infections. So it may surprise you to learn that there are some viruses — an entire group of viruses, in fact, that may be beneficial to us. These viruses, known as bacteriophage, or simply as “phage,” are viruses that infect and replicate only within bacteria and archaea.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

Bacteriophages are amongst the most common and diverse entities in the biosphere. They once were commonly used as medicine — to treat bacterial infections in people residing in the former Soviet Union, France, and parts of Eastern Europe during the 1920s and 1930s until the discovery of antibiotics displaced them from pharmacy shelves. Because antibiotics are so widely abused today — by the livestock industry in particular — bacteria have had plenty of opportunities to learn how to resist these drugs and they quickly shared their abilities widely with other, naive, bacteria. Some bacteria collected antibiotic-resistant methods rather like some people collect books, and now, bacteria are popping up that can resist every antibiotic and chemotherapy available.

These bacteria infect people, their livestock, and even their pets. But recently, steps have been taken to discover and harness the deadly capabilities of bacteriophages to selectively target, infect, and kill deadly drug-resistant bacterial infections in people (read more here). Thus, phages are considered to have a high therapeutic potential for the treatment of severe bacterial infections, especially those that cannot be treated with antibiotics.