Sewers.
You probably just think of them
as the fantastic poop tunnels under our cities.
And they are that, but they're also potentially
a place to meet nice clowns.
- Aren't you going to say hello?
- Abnormally large adolescent
martial artist turtles.
- I love being a turtle!
- And oh yes, cures.
The cures to deadly antibiotic resistant
bacterial infections could be found here, in a sewer.
And who doesn't want to take a weird sewer virus
and put it into their body?
This is On The Fringe.
A show about weird ideas that just might change the world.
- Let's do it this way.
This is sludge, sewage from Connecticut.
This one is from a pig farm,
we emailed them about collecting some samples,
'cause we expressed interest in E. Coli 15786, and phages.
New Hampshire, camping trip, Uganda, the Congo,
Thailand, Mexico, Haiti, Rwanda,
a pseudomonas infection, coliphage,
and acute watery diarrhea, and a chronic diarrhea.
- This is Ben Chan,
a researcher at Yale University.
Which is a very fancy college.
Less fancy, is the fact that he's often out
looking in sewers and ditches
for something called bacteriophages.
This little guy is a bacteriophage,
it's a virus that, I swear to God,
bites open bacteria and spits its own DNA into them
and makes them into a reproductive host.
Spewing out more bacteriophages.
It's basically like the xenomorphs from Alien.
But it only attacks bacteria,
which makes it a lot more fun to have around.
- ♪ Hello my baby, hello my honey. ♪
- When I'm looking for bacteriophages,
I go to where the bacteria is.
We use sewage a lot because there's plenty
of human associated bacteria is sewage.
But also environmental sources as well.
Like lakes, rivers, streams, compost, ditches, the ocean.
It really depends on what bacteria we're trying to target.
Bacteriophage is just a virus, it can only affect bacteria.
Often a single strain, or a single species of bacteria.
- So why on earth would we want to find viruses
to attack bacteria, when we've already got antibiotics?
Antibiotics are amazing, and in the past 70 plus years,
they've become our first line of defense
against bacterial infection.
They've saved hundreds of millions of lives.
Including yours, probably.
When you take antibiotics, you kill a lot of bacteria,
which helps your body fight an infection.
But the ones who survive,
might just evolve a resistance to that antibiotic.
If that resistant bacteria takes hold, congratulations,
you're officially patient zero
for the newest antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
There's not like a medal or anything, just whatever.
Antibiotic-resistant infections are on the rise,
and have been for decades.
It's a serious problem, and it's getting worse.
The general idea of phage therapy
is that you find a nasty phage virus
to eat the nasty bacteria that have invaded your body.
Then the phage dies out
because there's nothing left for it to eat.
- When I first came to Yale in 2013,
I was really ambitious and wanted to really push forward
a lot of this phage therapy work,
to try to get it actually applied in humans.
- You might imagine that when Ben
introduced the idea of putting sewer viruses
in peoples bodies in order to fight infections,
he faced years of resistance and opposition.
But you'd be wrong.
He was immediately put in touch with a doctor
who was like, "Yeah, let's do this."
- So I just walked over, had a meeting with him,
and he immediately said "There's a case that might work.
"Let's see if we can make it happen."
And that's how it started.
- Basically the story goes like this.
The doctor had an older patient
suffering from a bacteria infection
that wasn't responding to antibiotics.
After a year the infection had literally
eaten a hole in his chest.
And not the awesome kind.
- Eventually this hole formed,
where it was expressing puss and pseudomonas.
Yeah.
- Easy to see why
they were so eager to try phages out.
Ben took a sample of the bacteria,
found a phage that thought it was yummy,
and also did something else that was pretty dope.
- We found when bacteria became resistant
to this bacteriophage,
it became sensitive to antibiotics again.
So we were re-sensitizing the strain to antibiotics,
by using this bacteriophage.
- Nice.
They took the patient into the hospital.
But they couldn't reach the source of the infection
'cause it was too close to his heart,
so they just applied a little of the phage
to the draining end, and hoped for the best.
Then the patient did what you normally do
after an experimental surgery,
he hopped on a plane, and flew to Iran,
and was basically unreachable for the next few months.
They literally had no idea if he was alive or dead.
- I checked in periodically with Dr. Narayan.
Gets back to me and says, "Oh he had an emergency surgery,
"I'll try to get more information about it."
And I was immediately freaking out,
because this was a month after the procedure,
and I thought this was some consequence
of something that we did, and I was like, "Oh no.
"What did we do?"
Going over it, like, what I could've possibly done wrong.
- But then suddenly the patient reappeared.
- A month later, he pops in to Dr. Narayan's office
looking perfectly fine and healthy.
Fistulas gone, his wounds resolved, and everything's great.
For me it was very stressing for the fact that
your research could really impact this outcome.
But it was also really rewarding,
you know, when he came back and was fine and healed.
All that work really paid off.
- Ben is working to build a catalog of phages
that can be used to either wipe out a bacteria infection,
or re-sensitize it to antibiotics.
We'll probably need to get comfortable to the idea
of applying viruses to these sorts of infections,
because the alternative
is to surrender to antibiotic resistance.
And besides, after everything we've given to our sewers,
isn't it nice that they're finally giving something back?