'Tripod' Viruses Key to Fighting Future 'Superbugs' as Mass Global Infections Expected in Coming Decades, Scientists Say

They look like strange little bugs, but they might just save your life.

Phages — tiny tripod-looking viruses —are designed to attack and gobble up bacteria, and they might be the key to keeping increasing superbugs at bay, Knewz.com has learned.

A bacteriophage is a virus that can kill superbugs. By: MEGA

According to CNN, the phages are in clinical trials as scientists hope they can be a solution to the problem of antibiotic resistance.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics show that superbug infections are an “urgent global public health threat” that’s killing 5 million people worldwide.

“It’s estimated that by 2050, 10 million people per year — that’s one person every three seconds — is going to be dying from a superbug infection,” infectious disease epidemiologist Steffanie Strathdee, codirector of the first dedicated phage therapy center in North America, the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics, or IPATH, at UC San Diego School of Medicine, told CNN.

The antibiotic-resistant infections have been spreading rapidly, according to the CDC.

Scientists say using multiple phages will help kill bacteria that defends itself from just one. By: MEGA

In May 2022, an antibiotic-resistant eye infection began showing up in several states. By May 2023, the problem had spread to 18 states, and four people died, four lost eyes, 14 lost their vision and dozens more developed infections in other parts of their bodies.

“Only a fraction of patients actually had eye infections, which made the outbreak incredibly difficult to solve,” said epidemiologist Dr. Maroya Walters, who led the CDC’s artificial tears investigation.

“We saw people who were colonized by the organism develop urinary tract or respiratory tract infections months down the road, even though they were no longer using these drops,” Walters said. “One patient spread the infection to others in the health care facility.”

Scientists say that by 2050, 10 million people per year will be killed by superbugs. By: MEGA

Thankfully, the evolution of bacteria in the world today has led to a natural enemy to the superbugs: the bacteriophages.

Each set of phages is uniquely designed to overpower the superbugs.

“Each bacterial species, or even genotypes within it, can have a whole repertoire of phages that are attacking it, using a wide variety of methods to enter and debilitate the bacterial cell,” Paul Turner, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University and microbiology faculty member at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, told CNN.

Bacteria employ several maneuvers to counter an attack. In some cases, they shed their outer skins to eliminate docking ports the phages use to enter and destroy the superbugs.

Scientists say superbugs will kill one person every three seconds by 2050 if no solution is found. By: MEGA

That’s why specialists develop a variety of phages that will go in as reinforcements so the superbugs will run out of counter actions.

“Rather than just sourcing new phages from the environment, we have a bioreactor that in real time creates billions upon billions of phages,” Anthony Maresso, associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told CNN.

“Most of those phages won’t be active against the drug-resistant bacteria, but at some point there will be a rare variant that has been trained, so to speak, to attack the resistant bacteria, and we’ll add that to our arsenal,” Maresso said. “It’s a next-generation approach on phage libraries.”

Scientists say bacteriophage technology is still developing. By: MEGA

Scientists note that they are just at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to developing phage game plans.

“There’s a lot of approaches right now that are happening in parallel,” Roach said. “Do we engineer phages? Do we make a phage cocktail, and then how big is the cocktail? Is it two phages or 12 phages? Should phages be inhaled, applied topically or injected intravenously? There’s a lot of work underway on exactly how to best do this.”

And there’s plenty of work left to do.

“We were thinking about trying to develop a curated phage collection that would be active against a large number of certain resistant organisms,” she added. “Pseudomonas is a good place to start — there are more than 140 different species. But there are many other organisms that threaten us that we also need to tackle.”