Using Bacteriophages For Medical Therapies - Yale Medicine Explains

Transcript

• 00:06- The emergence of bacterial resistance is incredible.
• 00:10Bacteria are evolving to protect themselves
• 00:13or figure out ways to get around the antibiotics that we have.
• 00:21- Bacteriophages or phages are the viruses of bacteria.
• 00:25Some viruses can infect us and make us sick,
• 00:28but these ones are very specific
• 00:29and can only infect bacteria.
• 00:36The estimates are that there's
• 00:3710 to the 31st bacteriophages on the planet Earth.
• 00:40That's like 10 million times more than there are stars,
• 00:42so they're everywhere.
• 00:44- Especially in my clinical population with cystic fibrosis,
• 00:48we are really challenged with a limitation of antibiotics that are available to us.
• 00:54The common bacteria we see in the lungs are Pseudomonas and Staphylococcus Aureus
• 00:59and that's where colleagues at Yale came to me
• 01:02with this idea that there's a phage that could potentially
• 01:06target and kill Pseudomonas
• 01:08and potentially target and kill Staph.
• 01:11- Their killing mechanism is totally different than chemical antibiotics
• 01:14and so the way we're working with them,
• 01:16they work together with antibiotics.
• 01:18If you have something that's resistant to penicillin or something,
• 01:21it's very unlikely that it's also gonna be resistant to a particular phage.
• 01:26- In the laboratory, Dr. Chan is able to
• 01:28take a look at a library of phages
• 01:31and find a phage that's gonna target and kill that Pseudomonas
• 01:34and therefore, the risk is minimized because
• 01:37only that particular Pseudomonas will be targeted.
• 01:41- It's very personalized and it's very precise
• 01:43and you're just going in and removing a very
• 01:46specific strain of bacteria from the individual.
• 01:49- [Dr. Koff] And it becomes a really important example of personalized medicine,
• 01:53which is can we be very selective and specific
• 01:56to what's going on for each individual.
• 02:08It's encouraging because
• 02:10we've seen that the amount of Pseudomonas has decreased
• 02:13in the sputum of each of the individuals that we have treated
• 02:18and there's evidence that the Pseudomonas has become more sensitive to traditional antibiotics.
• 02:24- It's definitely the dream, right?
• 02:26To go from just a random discovery
• 02:29and doing the basic research,
• 02:30characterizing it
• 02:31and then bringing it all the way to the person.
• 02:33It's fantastic.
• 02:36- [Dr. Koff] It's a great example of someone in the laboratory
• 02:38working with someone in the clinic
• 02:41to take a good idea and develop it
• 02:44and as we all want to do as physicians, right?
• 02:47We got into this to help people
• 02:48and here in front of us is an opportunity.
• 02:52Obviously I'm a lung doctor, we're not limited to that.
• 02:55If we can develop this technique
• 02:56and understand how to utilize it,
• 02:58it then becomes available to other places
• 03:00where we have these multi-drug-resistant pathogens.