News
Synthetic phages as savior against antibiotic resistance? Katharina Höfer, LOEWE top professor, is researching phages and has now been interviewed about this in the science magazine Spektrum
Until now, phages have failed in medicine due to regulatory and practical hurdles. Genetically tailored, the bacterial viruses are now set to change medicine and biotechnology. Designer phages could revolutionize medicine: They are more resistant to environmental influences, recognize bacteria more versatile, circumvent resistance more effectively and act faster. Supported by learning algorithms that access extensive phage-bacteria databases, precise models can be developed to predict their effectiveness. The data required for this comes from basic research that investigates molecular interactions between phages and hosts.
The idea of using phages as a therapy goes back further than the use of antibiotics. However, with the discovery of penicillin, they were forgotten. But increasing antibiotic resistance, as with multi-resistant germs, has led to a rethink. Experts predict that resistant pathogens could cause more than 39 million deaths by 2050. This is where phages come into play again, because they kill. The great advantage of phages is that they specifically attack a species or even just a certain strain of a type of bacteria.
Synthetic phages, for their part, face high hurdles when it comes to approval. In 2019, researchers from the USA and the UK showed in a single-case study that they work in principle.
Experts agree that designer phages have the potential to change medicine. “Bio-engineered” phages are less sensitive to environmental influences, recognize host bacteria more broadly, overcome their resistance mechanisms more efficiently or kill faster and more effectively. Or even all at the same time. Learning algorithms that are fed with data from thousands of phage-bacteria interactions also help here. Such models could predict how effectively and efficiently a constructed phage recognizes and kills a specific bacterium. Data like this comes from basic research, such as how exactly phage and host interact on a molecular level. Katharina Höfer and her research group at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg are investigating this: how does the bacteriophage dock, how does it circumvent resistance mechanisms, how does it kill, and where is all this information located in the viral genome?
You can find the full article on this topic by Sigrid März at: https://www.spektrum.de/news/synthetische-phagen-bakterienkiller-aus-dem-genbaukasten/2253856