take a moment and think about a virus
what comes to your mind an illness of
fear probably something really
unpleasant and yet viruses are not all
the same it's true some of them cause
devastating disease but others can do
the exact opposite they can cure disease
these viruses are called phages now the
first time I heard about phages was back
in 2013 my father-in-law who's a surgeon
was telling me about the woman he was
treating the woman had a knee injury
required multiple surgeries and over the
course of these developed a chronic
bacterial infection in her leg
unfortunately for her the bacteria
causing the infection also did not
respond to any antibiotic that was
available so at this point typically the
only option left is to amputate the leg
to stop the infection from spreading
further now my father-in-law was
desperate for a different kind of
solution and he applied for an
experimental last resort treatment using
phages and guess what it worked within
three weeks of applying the phages the
chronic infection had healed up where
before no antibiotic was working I was
fascinated by this weird conception
viruses curing and infection to this day
I'm fascinated by the medical potential
of Phaedrus and I actually quit my job
last year to build a company in this
space now what is a phage the image that
you see here was taken by an electron
microscope and that means what we see on
the screen is in reality extremely tiny
the grainy thing in the middle with the
head the long body and the number of
feet this is the image of a prototypical
phage it's kind of cute
now take a look at your hand in our team
we've estimated that you have more than
10 billion pages on each of your hands
what are they doing there well viruses
are good at infecting cells and phages
are great at infecting bacteria and your
hand just like so much of our body is a
hotbed of bacterial activity making it
an ideal hunting ground for phages
because after all
Phaedra's hunt bacteria it's also
important to note that Phaedrus are
extremely selective hunters typically a
phage will only infect a single
bacterial species so in this rendering
here the phage that you see hunts for a
bacterium called Staphylococcus aureus
which is known as Mrs a in its
drug-resistant form causes skin or wound
infections and the way the phage hunt is
with its feet the feet are actually
extremely sensitive receptors on the
lookout for the right surface on a
bacterial cell once it finds it the
phage will latch on to the bacterial
cell wall and then inject its DNA DNA
sets in the head of the phage and
travels into the bacteria through the
long body at this point the phage
reprograms the bacteria into producing
lots of new pages the bacteria effect
becomes a phage factory once around
5,200 Phaedrus have accumulated within
the bacterial cell the Phaedrus are then
able to release a protein that disrupts
the bacterial cell wall as the bacteria
bursts the phages move out and go on the
hunt again for a new bacteria to infect
now I'm sorry this probably sounded like
a scary virus again but it's exactly
this ability of phages to multiply
within the bacteria and then kill them
that make them so interesting from a
medical point of view the other part
that I find extremely interesting is the
scale at which this is going on now just
five years ago I really had no clue
about Phaedrus and yet today I would
tell you they are part of a natural
principle Phaedrus and bacteria go back
to the earliest days of evolution they
have always existed in tandem keeping
each other in check so this is really
the story of yin and yang of the hunter
and the prey at a microscopically
some scientists have been estimated that
Phaedrus are the most abundant organism
on our planet
so even before we continue talking about
their medical potential I think
everybody should know about phages and
their role on earth they hunt infect and
kill bacteria now how come we have
something that works so well in nature
everyday everywhere around us and yet in
most parts of the world we do not have a
single drug on the market that uses this
principle to combat bacterial infections
the simple answer is no one has
developed this kind of a drug yet at
least not one that conforms to the
Western regulatory standards that set
the norm for so much of the world to
understand why we need to move back in
time this is a picture of Felix da
ville' he is one of the two scientists
credited with discovering Phaedrus
except when he discovered them back in
1917 he had no clue what he had
discovered he was interested in a
disease called bacillary Dyson tree
which is a bacterial infection that
causes severe diarrhea and back then was
actually killing a lot of people because
after all no cure for bacterial
infections had been invented he was
looking at samples from patients who had
survived this illness and he found that
something weird was going on something
in the sample was killing the bacteria
that were supposed to cause the disease
to find out what was going on he did an
ingenious experiment he took the sample
filtered it until he was sure that only
something very small could have remained
and then took a tiny drop and added it
to freshly cultivated bacteria and he
observed that with a number of hours the
bacteria had been killed he then
repeated this again filtering taking a
tiny drop adding it to the next batch of
fresh bacteria he does this in sequence
50 times always observing the same
effect and at this point he made two
conclusions first of all the obvious one
well yes something was killing the
bacteria and it was in that liquid the
other one it had to be biologic in
nature because a tiny drop was
sufficient to have a huge impact he
called the agent he had found an
invisible microbe and gave it the name
bacteriophage which literally translated
means bacteria eater and by the way this
is one of the most fundamental
discoveries of modern microbiology
so many modern techniques go back to our
understanding of how phages works in
genomic editing but also in other fields
and just today the Nobel Prize in
Chemistry was announced for two
scientists who work with phages and
develop drugs based on that now back in
the 1920s and 1930s people also
immediately saw the medical potential of
Phaedrus after all
albeit invisible you had something that
reliably was killing bacteria companies
that still exist today such as Abbott
Squibb or lily salt phage preparations
but the reality is if you're starting
with an invisible microbe it's very
difficult to get to a reliable drug just
imagine going to the FDA today and
telling them all about that invisible
virus you want to give to patients so
when chemical antibiotics emerged in the
1940s they completely changed the game
and this guy played a major role this is
Alexander Fleming he won the Nobel Prize
in medicine for his work contributing to
the development of the first antibiotic
penicillin and antibiotics really work
very differently than phages for the
most part they inhibit the growth of the
bacteria and they don't care so much
which kind of bacteria present the ones
that we call broad-spectrum will even
work against a whole bunch of bacteria
out there compare that to phages which
work extremely narrowly against one
bacterial species and you can see the
obvious advantage now back then this
must have felt like a dream come true
you had a patient with a suspected
bacterial infection you gave him the
antibiotic and without really needing to
know anything else about the bacteria
causing disease many of the patients
recovered and so as we developed more
and more antibiotics they rightly soul
became the first-line therapy for
bacterial infections and by the way they
have contributed tremendously to our
life expectancy we are only able to do
complex medical interventions and
medical surgeries today because we have
antibiotics and we don't risk the
patient dying the very next day from the
bacterial infection that he might
contract during the operation so we
started to forget about phages
especially in Western medicine and to a
certain extent even when I was growing
up the notion was we have solved
bacterial infections we have antibiotics
of course today we know that this is
wrong
today most of you will have heard about
superbugs those are bacteria that have
become resistant to many if not all of
the antibiotics that we have developed
to treat this infection how did we get
here well we weren't as smart as we
thought we were as we started using
antibiotics everywhere in hospitals to
treat and prevent at home for simple
colds on farms to keep animals healthy
the bacteria evolved in the onslaught of
antibiotics that were all around them
those bacteria survived that were best
able to adapt today we call these multi
drug-resistant bacteria and let me put a
scary number out there in the recent
study commissioned by the UK government
it was estimated that by 2050 10 million
people could die every year from multi
drug-resistant infections
compare that to 8 million deaths from
cancer per year today and you can see
that this is a scary number but the good
news is phages have stuck around and let
me tell you they are not impressed by
multi-drug resistance they are just as
happily killing and hunting bacteria all
around us and they've also said
selectively which today is really a good
thing today we are able to reliably
identify a bacterial pathogen that's
causing an infection in many settings
and their selectivity will help us avoid
some of the side effects that are
commonly associated with broad-spectrum
antibiotics but maybe the best news of
all is they are no longer and invisible
microbe we can look at them and we did
so together before we can sequence their
DNA we understand how they replicate and
we understand the limitations we are in
a great place to now develop strong and
reliable phage based pharmaceuticals and
that's what's happening around the globe
more than 10 biotech companies including
our own company are developing human
phage applications to treat bacterial
infections a number of clinical trials
are getting underway in Europe and the
US so I'm convinced that we're standing
on the verge of a renaissance of phage
therapy and to me the correct way to
depict the phage is something like this
to me phages are the superheroes that we
have been waiting for in our fight
against multi drug-resistant infections
so the next time you think about a virus
keep this image in mind after all a
phage might one day save your life thank
you
[Applause]
[Music]