March
18
Forgotten Cure pt2 3/18/19
- In the 1940s, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to introduce antibiotics to the USSR in order to generate more antibiotic production sites during the war. Because this was funded by other countries, it worked temporarily. After the war, however, the USSR had to rely on their own resources to fund antibiotic production and the state funding system was no help to this. The state’s priorities very much played a role in medicine in the following years. The political climate at the time prompted the Russian state to direct their priorities to weapon manufacturing and pushed medicine aside. This resulted in insufficient supplies of antibiotics in hospitals which were in high demand once the population caught word of the new medicine. To cope with this, the state manipulated the population by presenting antibiotics as foreign compared to the traditional natural remedies that were far cheaper. This set the stage perfectly for an increase in bacteriophage use.
- Ludwik Hirszfeld and his family were some of the many Jewish Poles sent to a ghetto occupied by Russia. There, Ludwik had a medical background which he continued to exercise in the ghetto. He and his family were able to escape and survive with false documents, but his daughter fell ill and died, a tragedy that left Ludwik feeling very distraught about his life work and the political situation he had been forced into where his family could not even go by there real names. Ludwik then moved to Wroclaw and became dean of the medical school. At the time, the Stalin supported idea of Lysenkoism, that genes did not exist and acquired traits were inherited proved to be an obstacle for Ludwik who’s studies were based off genes. He feared for his own persecution until Stalin’s sudden death, which actually enable him to start his own institute. The institute then became a leading center for phage therapy. This is starkly different from the Elavia institute in which Russian politics also played a part. The Eliava institute had been widely successful across the soviet when antibiotics were too expensive and more traditional, cheaper medications were favored by the state. However, when the soviet disbanded, there was not enough cliental to sustain the institute and it fell apart. I think the differences in success exist because Eliava Institute was located in Russia which became very unstable after the war. Hirszfield was located in Poland and was able to receive support from European Union.
- Merrils early experiments were hampered by the livers and spleens of the mice he was testing. Phages that he introduced into their systems were quickly rendered useless caught inside these organs. He hypothesized that this was the reason phage therapy had historically received poor scientific support. To breed more effective phages that could evade the liver and spleen he tested lamda phage on mice. Lamda phage was chosen because it was the most well known phage and had the most background information available. Lamda was inserted into the mice and then bacteriophages were harvested from the blood stream hours later. These harvested phages were reinjected into mice and the same process was repeated 8 times. In the end, Merril had a wild type phage that could avoid the liver and spleen with a survival rate 1000 times higher than the parent phage. The paper that Merril and his team published showed that over the course of 25 hours, the derived phages named argo1 and argo2 began at a higher concentration in the blood stream and decreased concentration at significantly slower rate. When different groups of mice were injected with the parent strand in comparison to argo1, both phages rid the mouse of disease when the control group resulted in death. The main difference was the effectiveness of the injection. Argo1 was more effective and the mice reached recovery sooner and had symptoms that did not go much past the 1 rating whereas the mice injected with the parent strand showed symptoms up to the 3 rating.
- GangaGen is a startup company developing ectolysins or highly-specific therapeutic proteins to target bacteria. Their leading ectolysin, p128, is a derived from a phage and can rapidly degrade a bacteria’s cell wall with only making contact with the outside and not having to enter the cell. In order to effectively test p128 by FDA standards, the drug must be administered in three different phases, showing promising results from each one. It must be delivered alongside a control to measure progress, and also used at various concentrations to farther measure effect. It would probably work in GangaGen’s favor to attempt combination trials to see if results could reach an even higher level of effectiveness.