science talk with
The fight against multi-resistant germs is realistic with bacteriophages, viruses that can only recognise and attack bacteria like a lock-and-key principle and are harmless to all other living organisms. With phages, nature has come up with an ingenious principle for controlling the bacterial mass in the biosphere. Every moment, approximately one third of the global bacterial mass undergoes a "turnover", i.e. is dissolved and lysed by specific phages.
Without this control, our planet would have been suffocated by the bacterial mass long ago.
Only around 10% of bacterial species are pathogens for humans or animals, the rest are beneficial or live peacefully with us. These so-called commensals, which become dangerous in weakened humans or animals, have been the target of excessive antibiotic use in recent decades and have become our enemies. Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, warned of antibiotic resistance back in 1928.
Antibiotics are a blessing in medicine, often saving lives. What is the problem? The molecular structure of antibiotics has been changed, made more effective and more broad-spectrum, and it is the sheer quantity that has been administered too generously over the last few decades. The bacteria knew how to defend themselves and developed admirable resistance mechanisms; many bacteria virtually "collect" these resistances and become multi-resistant.
The approximately 1.3 million deaths caused by antibiotic resistance worldwide in 2019 were comparable to the number of deaths from HIV and malaria combined. The main causes of the antibiotic crisis are only six types of bacteria! Vaccination is not possible against them, only against pneumococcal pneumonia. Infection research is lengthy and expensive, the pipeline for new antibiotics is virtually empty, and it takes around 8 years and up to 1.4 billion euros before a new antibiotic is launched on the market.
Do we also have natural antibacterial weapons? Others that do not pose a lasting environmental problem, have no toxic side effects, are non-allergenic, do not disrupt our microbiome and can counter the antibiotic crisis? Nature delivers them to us on a silver platter and they were discovered a decade before penicillin and used clinically as early as 1919.
Back to phages: they have shown great potential in the treatment of bacterial infections for more than 100 years. We have neglected phages due to antibiotics, but now they are sometimes used in a life-saving way, e.g.
In the Science Talk, microbiologist and phage expert Dr Christine Rohde from the Leibniz Institute DSMZ GmbH* in Braunschweig explains the possibilities, but also the limits of phages and phage therapy and where the path should quickly lead.
The events will be offered hybrid in presence and as a YouTube livestream.
*Recognised as a non-profit organisation
Dr Christine Rohde studied and completed her doctorate in microbiology in Göttingen, has been at the DSMZ for 38 years and has been working on the biology of phages for almost as long. Her team has developed into one of the best-known groups of phage experts in Germany. Dr Christine Rohde's personal research focus for around 15 years has been to prove the potential of phages as an alternative to antibiotics in clinical projects and to contribute to the approval process for phage therapy in Germany.
Dr Christine Rohde heads the Board of Trustees for Clinical Phages and Regulatory Affairs in the Bioresources for Bioeconomy and Health Research department at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ.
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