Fighting fire with fire: virus from a lake kills germ-resistant bacteria

An 80-year-old was dying from a serious bacterial heart infection. Resistant to all antibiotics, the infection defied the treatments of Deepak Narayan, MD. Contacted by a research scientist, Narayan heard an unusual proposal: use a pond-dwelling virus that hunts the specific bacterium infecting the patient’s heart to treat the infection. It worked, lending credence to the hypothesis that researchers have only begun to scrape the natural world’s potential for combating illness and disease.