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Phage therapy: How Canadian doctor used century-old medicine to save dying Husband from ‘super bug’
I’m Stephanie stay I’m the associate dean of global Health Sciences at University of California San Diego we were on a vacation to Egypt in November of 2015 over Thanksgiving in the US and Tom got very sick all of a sudden um we thought it was food poisoning but he just kept throwing up and I gave him a dose of an antibiotic that we take with us on our travels and he got worse and worse and we called a doctor to the ship and the doctor gave him some IV antibiotics and also o some fluids and
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said oh he’s going to be fine in a couple hours and he wasn’t he got sicker we got a medact out of there thankfully because we had travel insurance and they took him to um Germany and there he was diagnosed with a giant abscess in his abdomen that was caused by a gall stone that had obstructed his b duct and inside this abscess lurked the worst super bug on the planet and it turned out to be resistant to almost every antibiotic right off the bat well I was really shocked because I’m trained as an
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infectious disease epidemiologist from the University of Toronto and I used to you know plate this bacteria on my Petri dishes back in my classes in the 1980s and it was seemed like a pretty wimpy bacterium back then but over the last few decades this has become a very nasty bacteria it is what I consider to be a bacterial kleptomaniac it steals these antibiotic resistance genes from other bacteria it turned out that this bacteria was was resistant to all antibiotics so it’s what they call Pan
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resistant and there was nothing that they could do little by little day by day he was slipping away and he was going to die unless something drastic happened he was in the hospital for 9 months and uh was on a conference call with my colleagues who were at a retreat and one of them was a former surgeon and a university Chancellor and he thought I’d hung up the phone and he said has anybody told Steph that her husband is going to die well I was terrified it really hadn’t clued into me that he was going
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to die there’s the one day where I decid to have the talk with Tom his eyebrows were twitching even though he was in a coma I wasn’t sure if he could hear me but I said honey you know I know you’re fighting really hard but if you decide that you don’t want to fight anymore I’ll understand but if you want to live I want to grow old with you please squeeze my hand hand and I’ll I’ll leave no stone unturned and he squeezed my hand and of course I was just elated but then I
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realized oh my God like how am I going to like solve this problem I’m not a medical doctor but I did go home and I sat down um with my computer and I know how to do a literature search and um I went into the Google for scientist which is called PubMed and I put some key words in there the name of his superbug altern alternative treatments multi-drug resistance and up popped a paper with an obscure therapy from a 100 years ago called phage therapy now bacteria phages or phages for short are viruses that
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have naturally evolved to attack bacteria they’re 100 times smaller than bacteria and they were discovered by a French Canadian in 1917 Felix Durell and they had been used by this guy to treat people with bacterial infections um and they had something of a Heyday in the 1920s and 30s but then penicillin came on the scene and so these fages which were really finicky they had to be matched to specific bacteria they were kind of Forgotten back in the 1980s I studied virology at the University of
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Toronto and my professor there had taught us what bacteria phage were it’s just that I didn’t ever know that they were used to treat people so I got really excited when I thought this could be something that might be able to use to save Tom so I contacted his doctors here at the University of California San Diego and I said whatat do you think about Fage therapy to cure Tom and the head of infectious diseases said you know this might be ahead of its time but if you can find some fages that match
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his bacteria I’ll call the FDA and get approval for compassionate use that really meant that he knew he was dying and so that’s what we did 3 days after we injected them into his bloodstream he woke up he lifted his head off the pillow and he kissed his daughter’s hand I mean everybody freaked out it was just an incredible feeling well I just couldn’t believe it I mean we all hoped that this was going to work um but it worked so quickly I mean here’s a guy who was hours away literally from dying
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and then he wakes up and he’s able to kind of communicate good morning what what is it that you’d like today oh nice hamburger would be good a hamburger we’ll see what we can do about that as a result of Tom’s case we’ve treated several other people at UC San Diego with Fage therapy successfully in fact we launched the first dedicated phage Therapy Center called iPath or the center for Innovative phage applications and Therapeutics we’re helping other doctors administer Fage around the world
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and we’re a nonprofit um we’ve also gotten a lot of calls from Canada um most recently you know about a dozen calls just in the last week and these are patients that have superbug infections that um antibiotics aren’t working for them anymore cheers baby super bugs are Global prices this is not a problem that’s going away in fact we don’t even know how many people are dying per year in Canada from superbug infections but we do know that by the year 2050 one person every 3 seconds is
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going to be dying from Super bugs and um so we need to step up to the plate and Canada is well poised to do that