March
14
The Forgotten Cure (Chapters 5-8)
- In 1940s-50s Russia, phage therapy was more popular to use rather than antibiotics since it was cheaper to use. Due to state health system in Russia, this impacted on phage therapy. Most of the issues were due to lack of funding. Dr. Pokrovskaya’s reports hinted that phage therapy yielded such conflicting results was because it was hard to store and complex to use. Advanced technology wasn’t developed and needed funding for it, the lack of funding prevented that to happen.
- Hirszfeld Institute had gone through tragic events with the Russians. After Hirszfeld’s daughter passed away, he settled in Wroclaw and petitioned the Polish Academy of Sciences to set up an institute. However, the request was possibly slowed by a series of events taking place in the Soviet Union at the time. Hirszfeld fell victim to Lysenkoisa and he designated Milgrom as his successor of his institute. Throughout the years, his institute was involved in phage typing and other institutes came to be. Two of them are the Eliava institute and Phage therapy center. Eliava institute has goals that are more toward research of bacteriophages and their potential uses in therapy while Phage therapy center focuses more on the treatment of patients. Both institute have common goals, but do have their differences.
- Merril injected infected blood with bacteriophage, have it harvested in the mice for 7 hours, and repeated for a few times until a large amount of bacteriophage strains were present. The phages were named Argo1 and Argo2. Merril and his team found out that those strains could stay in the mices’ stomach at large amounts and rate than the control. According to PNAS, the control would go down by nearly half the amount as the staring titer. Argo1 and Argo2 only went down by a small amount. Through this, Merril and his team saw that the mice that were treated with phage therapy improved their conditions than mice without phage therapy.
- GangaGen was created by Ramachandran who decided to set it up in India due to advantage of cost and plenty of people to recruit. There were plenty of high tech companies around them to help them. He had the same mindset of to “follow D’Herelle’s principal that in a hospital there is always somebody natural recovering and therefore there is a chance they’ve been exposed to the phage in the environment. In fact, that proved to be true.” (pg 85) Nowadays, GangaGen is focused on developing novel therapeutic proteins targeting infectious diseases in areas of high unmet need such as MRSA and other drug resistant bacteria. Using a proprietary platform, GangaGen is developing highly-specific therapeutic proteins called ectolysins to target clinically meaningful types of bacteria. Ectolysins act very rapidly to lyse bacteria and therefore have low potential for developing resistance. Each ectolysin is specific to the type of bacteria for which it is developed and leaves other beneficial bacteria unaffected. This means that ectolysins can work on drug resistant bacteria or when the bacteria are not active, such as in hard-to-treat biofilms. It would be interesting to see experiments to how ectolysins can affect different strains of bacteriophages or strains that are not yet identified or annotated as well as the rate of the ectolysins activity.
Soo-Un, I wrote in my response about GangaGen as well, and I was curious to know more about what obstacles need to be tackled in terms of making sure phage therapy is effective for the human body. As Lucy stated in her comment on Henry’s post, bacteria will become resistant to the virus strains as well as antibiotics. Ectolysins do have a low resistance potential, but I was curious as to what your thoughts were on the obstacles we could see with ectolysins in the animal systems, would we possibly a rejection of these proteins like Merill observed in his rats?
Cooper, that is a good point. I think it might be a possibility that these proteins can be rejected. We may not know for sure how ectolysins can act due to FDA regulations. There could also a possibility of a different option or form of ecotlysins that have a higher resistance potential. Perhaps if another form is found, a study could be conducted.