Will Viruses Save Us From Superbugs?
For years, Ali Khodadoust walked around with his heart literally open to the world. In 2012 surgeons replaced his aortic arch and unknowingly planted bacteria. The bacteria secreted a sticky biofilm and burrowed a channel through his chest, creating a peephole to the open air.
It was a dangerous intimacy. The antibiotics the elderly man dutifully swallowed every morning to fight the infection didn’t kill the bacteria. So doctors inserted plastic tubing into his shoulder, funneling antibiotics directly into his bloodstream. But antibiotic after antibiotic failed. After three years, Khodadoust an ophthalmologist in New Haven, Connecticut, was referred to Yale-New Haven Hospital for treatment. Tawny pus oozed out of an opening the size of a pencil eraser on his chest. Strands of bright blood streaked the pus. At any moment, the bacteria could move into his blood, triggering septic shock and killing him.
To destroy the nasty bug, surgeons would need to slice out the infected tissue, wash out his heart cavity, and replace his aortic arch, again. But they were wary of performing heart surgery on older patients, especially given that the operation would require cutting through a bacterial sheath. They decided that surgery was too risky and postponed operating. Another group in Texas rejected him. Finally, Khodadoust’s last hope, a hospital in Zurich, turned him away.
While Khodadoust was struggling to survive, a microbiologist named Benjamin Chan was working away at an experimental evolution laboratory just one mile to the north. Chan was investigating bacteriophages in the lab of Paul Turner, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale. From the Greek phagein, to devour, bacteriophages, or phages, are the viruses that devour bacteria. Phages thrive where bacteria do—which means pretty much everywhere. No organisms on Earth are as ubiquitous or diverse as phages. We touch phages every time we play in the ocean, nibble our kale salads, or kiss. Billions of years of evolution have made phages the ultimate bacterial killers—quiet, stealthy, and effective. But, curiously, no hospitals in the United States currently treat patients with phages.
Khodadoust didn’t know this at the time, but Chan was about to make an exception out of him.
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