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- For decades, patients behind the Iron Curtain were denied access to some of the best antibiotics developed in the West. To make do, the Soviet Union invested heavily in the use of bacteriophages — viruses that kill bacteria — to treat infections. Phage therapy is still widely used in Russia, Georgia and Poland, but never took off elsewhere. “This is a virus, and people are afraid of viruses,” says Mzia Kutateladze, who is the head of the scientific council at the Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, which has been studying phages and using them to treat patients for nearly a century.
- An engineered phage could, in theory, be patented. At the ASM meeting last month, researchers led by synthetic biologist Timothy Lu at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge presented work on a phage engineered to use a DNA-editing system called CRISPR to kill only antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The phage injects the bacterium with DNA, which the microbe transcribes into RNA. If part of the bacterium’s antibiotic-resistance gene matches that RNA sequence, an enzyme called Cas9 cuts up the cell’s DNA, killing it.