Imagine that you have a devastating heart infection that won’t respond to medication. For one 76-year-old man, that nightmare was his reality. Following surgery for an aortic aneurysm — which makes the heart’s main artery swell to almost twice its normal size — a nasty bacterial infection caused by the microbe Pseudomonas aeruginosa had taken over.
Beyond that, the bacteria in his body slowly became resistant to even massive doses of antibiotics. The septic infection became so bad that a cavity grew in the patient’s chest; drainage began to erode his aorta, making surgery highly risky. Desperate, the patient and his doctors tried an experimental treatment that would become known as “phage therapy.” In January 2016, doctors injected him with a mixture of antibiotics and hundreds of millions of viruses called OMKO1 that were found in a pond in Connecticut.
The idea was that this virus would target efflux pumps that P. aeruginosa had evolved to spit out bacteria-killing drugs. The bacteria would then evolve new resistance to the virus by deleting these pumps — but this selection would make the pathogen susceptible to antibiotics again.
