Comment by iamsohungry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamsohungry | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, from what I can tell (I'm not a professional in this field) the underlying issue here seems to be that bacteria are evolving faster than the fungi and molds that produce antibiotics. The solution is to find something that evolves faster than bacteria: viruses. Bacteria will never evolve as fast as viruses because their reproductive cycles are much longer.

The opposition to bacteriophage research comes from the belief that bacteriophage research could accidentally produce viruses that are deadly to humans or be used as a cover for biological weapons research. But these concerns are invalid: bacteria and human cells are drastically different, and so are the viruses that attack them: there's no chance that bacteriophages will mutate into viruses that attack human cells. And as the necessary equipment to do research on viruses becomes cheaper and cheaper and more easily constructable from widely available components, blocking legitimate bacteriophage research does less and less to prevent illegal biological weapons research.

> bacteria and human cells are drastically different

Doesn't that sort of depend on what you consider a human cell? Our gut bacteria is supposed to be fairly important to us, and something that might affect it on a large scale might have consequences.

Note, that I'm not saying that bacteriophage use if harmful, just that you have to be careful when discounting possible harmful side-effects. History is rife with examples of new safe health technologies that we only understand the negative aspects of later.

Ah, yeah, that's an interesting concern. Anyone with more knowledge about microbes want to weigh in on how much of a concern this really is?

Um, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiota --- in human bodies, "bacteria seem to outnumber cells 10 to 1".

Mitochondria, the "power houses of cells" seem to be bacteria.

Nope, the problem is you need to identify the specific Bacteria that's causing a problem before you can use a bacteriophage to fight it. Antibiotics are much simpler to use.

> Nope, the problem is you need to identify the specific Bacteria that's causing a problem before you can use a bacteriophage to fight it.

Uh, that's not actually an issue as I understand it. The treatment, as I understand it, works by starting with a sample of infected tissue from the infected person. The bacteriophages are then grown starting from a few different kinds of starters, but the process I read about starts with a broad spectrum of bacteriophages. As long as a bacteriophage is close enough to being able to attack the desired bacteria, it some percentage of the bacteriophages will mutate into the exact bacteriophages you want. Since the available food for the bacteriophages is the bacteria you want to kill, the bacteriophage specific to that bacteria grows exponentially until there are enough bacteriophages. At this point the solution contains a large number of bacteriophages specifically bred to kill the bacteria in question. The solution is reintroduced into the infected tissue, where it eats most of the bacteria.

> Antibiotics are much simpler to use.

Chanting healing spells is simpler to use than antibiotics and in a few decades time it will be equally effective.

Getting the broad spectrum of bacteriophages is not easy. Nor is a sample of infected tissue (ex: meningitis).

Don't get me wrong, it could be a viable backup. But, it's not nearly as useful for things like surgery where you want to knock everything down before there is a problem. And it's not nearly as cheap as handing out penicillin was.

PS: Another issue is separating out the Bacteria phages without introducing a lot of new possible infections.

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