Topic
Medical use of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, to treat drug-resistant infections, often via engineered or tailored phage cocktails.
University of Utah Health found bacteria detect a phage when the phage's protease cuts a host sensor protein, triggering a self-destruct defence. The team named the defence CBASS and says the finding, published in Science, could guide phage therapies built to evade it.
Reality
University of Utah Health researchers found that the bacterial immune system CBASS fires when a phage's own protease cuts a host sensor protein. It identifies the exact molecular step a phage would have to evade.
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NTU scientists built a compound that starves Mycobacterium abscessus of energy; paired with the drug clofazimine it cut the microbe a hundredfold in four days. Two other teams mapped the same bacterium's virus defenses and a related pathogen's toxin-firing weapon.
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University of Otago researchers built a CRISPR method that disrupts genes across whole phage genomes to tell the essential from the dispensable. Reported in Nature Microbiology, the same transposon can also carry new genes in, so it maps function and engineers it in one step.
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Vatsan Raman's lab at UW-Madison trained an AI that engineered phages to infect bacteria up to a million times more effectively in lab tests. The Cell Systems work aims at phage therapies that could replace failing antibiotics.
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A PNAS study compared predicted tail fiber structures for phages tested on Pseudomonas aeruginosa and found the broader-spectrum ones differ from each other where they touch the bacterial pilus. Dozens of database relatives fit the same pattern.
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Gut phage therapy usually fails because you cannot get enough phage to enough bacteria in time. A team writing in Nature Microbiology built a resident E. coli that makes the phage on site, and it protected mice against an oral Salmonella challenge.
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A UCL micro-bladder with cycling urine pushed uropathogenic E. coli inside the bladder lining, where an antibiotic that looks reliable in standard tests fell short and a phage cocktail cut the hidden reservoirs it left behind.
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The authors turn phage cocktail design from trial and error into a resistance-management calculation, where the levers a clinician controls are how broad the cocktail is and how early it lands. It is theory, and it is specific enough to argue with.
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