MEET THE BACTERIA KILLERS

Trials of an exciting new way of treating dangerous drug-resistant infections will start to report results in 2021. Thesetreatments involve patients being injected with billions of virusparticles that specifically infect and kill bacteria.

Such viruses - known as bacteriophages (or just ‘phages’)- are found everywhere there are bacteria and replicate by inserting their genes into bacterial cells. Once infected with the virus genes, the bacterial cell goes awry and starts producing viral proteins, which assemble into new viruses. Within as littleas half an hour, the cell bursts and tens or hundreds of new viruses are released to repeat the cycle in another host. They’reremarkably effective at this: some studies suggest that for every grain of sand on Earth there are over a trillion phages inexistence at any one time.

Given their natural bacteria-killing abilities, these nanoscopic predators could be key in the fight against the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance. And the idea of using them in medicine isn’t really