Tom Patterson was infected with bacteria that were multidrug resistant to antibiotics. It owes its salvation to bacteriophages.
On the occasion of Thanksgiving in 2015, Tom Patterson and his wife Steffanie Strathdee took a trip to the land of the pyramids. But as they sailed up the Nile towards Luxor, the 69-year-old complained of severe abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and fever. Hospitalized in an Egyptian hospital, doctors diagnosed him with inflammation of the pancreas. But pancreatitis is resistant to standard treatments.
As his condition worsened, his doctors advised him to be treated in Germany. The analyzes carried out in Frankfurt reveal that the professor of psychiatry at the University of San Diego (United States) was infected by a bacterium naturally resistant to many antibiotics, called Acinetobacter baumannii.
About ten days later, his condition stabilized enough to be transported to the United States and admitted to intensive care in the hospital where he works. When it arrived, the tests brought very bad news: the bacteria had become resistant to all the antibiotics currently available. Worse, the infection reached his bloodstream causing sepsis and plunging him into a coma.
Bacteria viruses, the last remedy
His wife, an epidemiologist specializing in infectious diseases and head of the public health department at the University of San Diego, then sets out in search of an alternative to antibiotics capable of saving his life. Her research then led her to work in Tbilissi (Georgia) on bacteria viruses, called bacteriophages.
At the start of the last century, it was the Franco-Canadian Félix d’Hérelle, a microbiologist at the Institut Pasteur, who named this antibacterial therapy “phage therapy”. The centenary of research in this field is also being celebrated this week at the Institut Pasteur in Paris.
These viruses live where the bacteria thrive. There are several billion billions of them on the planet and each strain of virus can infect only one strain of bacteria. Research on these phages developed a lot until the 1930s, but the arrival of antibiotics threw this therapy into oblivion. Except in Eastern Europe, and in particular in the Soviet Union.
A first in the United States
A chance for Tom Patterson who received a cocktail of 4 phages collected in wastewater – an environment where they are found in abundance. To optimize their effectiveness, the therapy was given to her directly into the abdomen and intravenously, with no guarantee that it would work. “As a doctor it was a real challenge,” said Prof. Robert Schooley, head of the infectious disease department at San Diego School of Medicine and friend of Tom Patterson. Usually you know which dosage will work and how often to give it. But when you use therapy for the first time, you have no example to refer to ”.
A risky but winning bet. Three days after the start of treatment, the patient came out of his coma. The phage therapy was continued for more than two months. It was not until June that the bacteria were completely eliminated from his body.
“To our knowledge, he is the first patient in the United States with such a serious infection to receive phage therapy,” said Professor Robert Schooley. And while he was near death, he recovered enough to start working again. Obviously, this is only a patient, a single case and we do not yet fully understand the potential and the limits of this therapy, but this unprecedented story, and given the threat of antibiotic resistance, this pushes us to continue our research ”
Antibiotic resistance will be responsible for millions of deaths
“Phage therapy has truly been a miracle for me, and it could become a miracle for the millions of people with infections caused by multi-drug resistant bacteria around the world,” said Prof. Tom Patterson.
By 2050, antibiotic resistance could kill 10 million people each year around the world, more than cancer. A massacre directly induced by an unreasonable use of antibiotics and the ability of bacteria to resist these attacks. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 12 families of bacteria are particularly threatening. If the development of new antibiotics is more than urgent to fight them, phages present themselves as a powerful ally.
Listen to the interview with Prof. Patrice Courvalin, researcher at the Institut Pasteur (Paris):
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