Science and technology | The antibiotics crisis

Western firms are becoming interested in a Soviet medicine

“Phage therapy” aims to use viruses to cure bacterial infections

^BT4 bacteriophage.^b Coloured transmission electron micrograph (TEM) of a ^IT4 bacteriophage^i virus. The swollen structure at top is the head, which contains DNA inside a protein coat. Attached to this is the tail, consisting of a tube-like sheath and tail fibres (at bottom). ^IT4 bacteriophages^i are parasites of ^IEscherichia coli^i, a bacteria common in the human gut. The virus attaches itself to the host bacteria cell wall by its tail fibres; the sheath then contracts, injecting the contents of the head (DNA) into the host. The viral DNA makes the bacteria manufacture more copies of the virus. Magnification: x110,000 at 6x4.5cm size. — Image: Science Photo Library

May 3rd 2023|Tbilisi

It was on the golf course that Barry Rud first noticed something was seriously wrong. A trim 60-year-old who played hockey as a young man, he found himself unable to take more than a few steps without gasping for breath. His doctors said he had caught a strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, one of the growing number of “superbugs” that have evolved resistance to many common antibiotics.

Mr Rud’s experience illustrates a growing problem—and one possible solution to it. Antibiotics are among medicine’s most spectacular achievements. A class of “silver bullet” drugs that destroy disease-causing bacteria while sparing the patient’s own cells, they have defanged all sorts of once-feared illnesses, from cholera to syphilis. They have drastically reduced the risks of surgery (patients often died from infections caught on the surgeon’s table) and chemotherapy, which destroys the patient’s immune system.

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "Viral therapy"