Via The Guardian: Teenager recovers from near death in world-first GM virus treatment. Excerpt:
A British teenager has made a remarkable recovery after being the first patient in the world to be given a genetically engineered virus to treat a drug-resistant infection.
Isabelle Holdaway, 17, nearly died after a lung transplant left her with an intractable infection that could not be cleared with antibiotics. After a nine-month stay at Great Ormond Street hospital, she returned to her home in Kent for palliative care, but recovered after her consultant teamed up with a US laboratory to develop the experimental therapy.
The scientists behind the breakthrough have said bacteria-killing viruses, known as phages, have the potential to be used as an alternative treatment to counter the growing crisis of resistance to antibiotics.
Isabelle’s mother, Jo, who made the initial suggestion of phage therapy to doctors at Great Ormond Street after reading about it online, said her daughter was “the luckiest child on earth” to have received the treatment in time.
“It’s incredible medical science. It’s been a miracle,” she said.
Isabelle has cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that results in frequent infections clogging up the lungs with mucus. By summer 2017, her lungs had less than a third of their normal function and she had been plagued by two stubborn bacterial strains for eight years. She and her doctors decided a double lung transplant was the best option, even though it meant her existing infections could spread.
After the transplant, this fear became a reality: a bacterial strain similar to TB took hold, colonising her surgical wound, then her liver, until eventually pockets of bacteria known as nodules began pushing through the skin on her arms, legs and buttocks.
“She lost so much weight. She was literally like a skeleton,” Jo said. “The bacteria was just coming through her skin. There was nothing they could do to make her comfortable. It was horrific.”
She searched the internet for alternative treatments and on reading about phage therapies asked Isabelle’s consultant, Helen Spencer, whether this might be an option.
By chance, a Great Ormond Street colleague was in touch with Prof Graham Hatfull, a scientist who had spent more than three decades amassing a collection of phages, stored in 15,000 frozen vials at the University of Pittsburgh. Hatfull agreed to help find a treatment for Isabelle and another teenage patient at Great Ormond Street who had a life-threatening infection.
Phages work by infecting bacteria cells and killing them, but they are very specific in which infections they can target. Hatfull and colleagues identified dozens of phages known to infect bacterial relatives of the patients’ strains, and tested thousands of combinations of them in petri dishes to see which wiped out the patients’ bacteria.
Update: For details on this case, see this excellent article by Ed Yong in The Atlantic.
