To save a young woman besieged by superbugs, scientists hunt a killer virus
The word from the doctors came early this week: They had tried one cocktail of antibiotics after another, but Mallory Smith’s fever and chill and chest rattle were only getting worse. They were out of options.
Her father, though, had an idea. He wanted to infect Mallory with a virus — one carefully selected to kill the bacteria that had colonized her lungs. It was hardly foolproof, and it would require special emergency approval from the federal government, but it might just do what the antibiotics couldn’t.
First, they needed the virus. Mark Smith had read about a similar case from 2016. He’d already been emailing with the scientists involved. Now, he gave them the go-ahead.
The next day, a strange tweet went out from Steffanie Strathdee, the associate dean of global health science at the University of California, San Diego: “#Phage researchers! I am working with a team to get Burkholderia cepacia phages to treat a 25 y old woman with CF whose infection has failed all #antibiotics. We need lytic non-lysogenic phage URGENTLY to find suitable phage matches.”
In other words, she was on the hunt for a bacteriophage — literally, a bacteria-eater — that would attack the antibiotic-resistant Burkholderia cepacia in Mallory’s lungs. It couldn’t be just any old phage. It had to be a virus that would actually explode the bacteria, instead of peacefully nestling inside them for a while.
Strathdee had worked as a phage-wrangler before. Her husband, in fact, had been the patient Smith had read about. A combination of phage therapy and antibiotics woke him from a coma in 2016. After that, others began to seek
