CLARIFICATION: Towards the end of the video I say "There are some obstacles before we're all taking influenza-phage or something". The biggest of these obstacles is that influenza is caused by a virus, not a bacteria, so influenza-phage specifically can't exist. It was a throwaway line to end the section, but I should've been more careful with my words. Mea culpa.
@@StoutShakoviruses do not have the capability of producing cell components, so a virus can’t infect another virus because there is no replication process to produce more viruses
@@happysloth3208correct & while viralophage are highly complex, bacterialophage have been studied for sometime. Ofcourse there's always a risk of accidentally empowering them instead of destroying them - Irrespectively the analogy is spot on considering just coz bacteria evolves, doesn't mean that we can't guide it's evolution to become less deadly as happened with the various foreign virus, bacteria living in our body without affecting us. PS - bat's immune system are also like this, it initially evolved to combat the cancer the bats could get due to the extreme metabolic stress from flight but since then has gotten so efficient that most bacteria/virus can't bypass it.
I’m so glad I’m a historian, instead of going through tedious medical research papers, I get to sift through tedious tax and census data and maybe even some random inconsequential letters between people that have been long forgotten by time!
Right - after enough 40 page papers with an average syllable count of greater than 3 you have gotta have some kind of break. Without a few turtles in your life by page 30 you can not even keep track of which paragraph your in. ALL HAIL TURTLES or ugly parasitic worms or - whatever breaks it up and lets the brain defog itself.
Interesting enough in Russia phages are quite often used for curing pregnant women in child birth clinics as safe alternatives for antibiotics without any complications. There are preproduced cocktails of strains for many types of bacteria there - streptococcus, staphylococcus, even a supercoktails against intestine or std infections. And it works pretty well. I’m glad to know phage treatment idea becomes more popular.
There is super weird cold war politics at work here. The West rejected phage therapy in part due to its use in Soviet Russia and Georgia. It was a very absurd reason to just ignore a promising are of medicine!
Phage therapy was rejected in the west due to easy access to antibiotics. Embargos made antibiotics scarce in USSR. And even though scarce, ORSA, VRSA and MRSA resistant bacteria still showed up. Their phage program could eliminate the resistant bugs ad well as the more common ones. They could even culture phages from a patients own biome too.
Probably it is not profitable enough and curing someone once and for all is bad idea leaving corporations without stable profit. Patient should suffer until he die and feeling slight relief after buying miracle drug from beloved corporation to keep them happy for several more days to buy another portion. Subscription based therapy suppose to be next step in medicine. Story about soviet medicine reminds me stories about mustard plaster that used in US as pointless plaster without any results or brilliant green that is yet another dye.
@@hmu958Culturing phages from one’s own biome is actually a really cool concept. I imagine it works by adding a small amount of a super-cocktail of phages, then the ones needed replicate from the sample to select for the ones you need?
So this might explains why some of the springs or even a well has some sort of healing properties in some folklores. They are literally teaming with bacteriophagies
@@ohhowfuckingoriginal Also like that sir, indeed minerals from water makes you healthier but I was referring to what my grandma's story that says back then, when dysentery outbreak was prevalent, they once drank from a specific well that does heals you like a miracle and I also heard that to not to boil it as its magic will be lost. Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker.
Proof that folk traditions often have some basis in empirical, but irrational, reason. Though not all, Hindus putting cow feces in wells is definitely a bad idea.
Antibiotics vs Bacteriophage is such an awesome example of why (for many reasons) collaboration is our collective key to success. imagine if the west and east had followed the science and the knowledge together. You know, instead of playing the game of whos got the bigger nuke
If they were collaborating then the West would have helped them expand antibiotics production and phages would have fallen at the wayside there too. If you want to nurture multiple solutions they often need to be kept isolated to prevent one winning everywhere.
@@itsgonnabeokaiIt was competitiveness that pushed advance in science. If there were no adversity, the funding would be reduced and everyone involved would become complacent. And competition is the engine of capitalism.
@@boulderbash19700209 Competition also happens to be the engine of people so we really wouldn't be getting anything done if we had no reason to compete.
Putting a little Indian context here, there is a long held Indian belief that waters of the Ganga have healing properties. There’s mythological reasons for this, Ganga being the biggest river systems in the region and being a literal mythological Goddess eminating from the matted locks of Shiva from up the Himalayas. But I can’t help but wonder if there were observational anecdotal accounts over the centuries that solidified the belief in the magical healing properties of the waters.
I would bet there is an abundant and varied collection of phages in the Ganga ! I remember my Dad visiting Varanasi with me and he had brought from Canada a badly infected thumb which upon immersing it in the Ganga , cleared completely the next day 😃
Humans throughout history have explained things with myth and religion. Truly sad. Once you decide something happens due to divine intervention, you no longer have any reason to investigate more deeply. Thus, your cultures scientific knowledge will never progress, or at best, progress very slowly, especially when the relevant religions persecute the individuals questioning the religious dogma!
As someone who is not supposed to take antibiotics for medical reasons, bacteriophages as treatment really excite me. I had to research them freshman year of undergrad, I watched a talk and the ones the presenter (Paul Turner, PhD) was discussing were really interesting. When applied to the target (antibiotic resistant) bacteria, they either killed them successfully or the bacteria developed resistance to the bacteriophages *and lost their antibiotic resistance*, in which case antibiotics could be used to kill them!
At least in the US, the regulatory hurdle is by far the hardest challenge (I’d argue moreso than the science). The FDA has tracks for biologic drugs and vaccines, but not for drugs that are (nearly) living creatures. Under the current paradigm, your evolved bacteriophages would be classified as a separate drug than the original, requiring a separate approval process, and costing another tens-hundreds of millions of dollars + most of a decade to get to market. Phage therapy is among the clearest cases of FDA regs actively holding back medical progress.
We actually did a unit in class on MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) in high school biology, and then my aunt caught it the next year. The entire time, I was just thinking about how an antibiotic and phage blend likely could have cured it so much faster and with less lung damage. MRSA is a huge issue in hospitals right now, because the variety of antibiotics used within a hospital result in workers’ skin bacteria developing multiple antibiotic resistances, which makes cross contamination so much more dangerous.
The idea of nanobots is really funny if you learn about microbiology because nanobots already exist! They're just living cells and viruses, we just don't ever appreciate how insanely cool they are. Like your immune system isn't some boring passive thing, it's literally an army of nanobots fanatically dedicated to protecting your life, so much so that they will and often do kill themselves.
Finally, a fellow genius. A couple years ago, I argued with our teacher then I decided to take a personal project to prove your analysis, why engineer batteries for tiny bots when viruses and enzymes are way better than that.
@@ZElphear-qv4ix Except it does not work. Immune system attacks phages after about a week or so of treatment ... makes it ineffective. It is an old idea that never worked out.
My partner had CF, and she died from complications caused by chronic bacterial lung infections several years ago at age 30. Previously, the toxicity of the antibiotics she'd been treated with damaged her inner ears, causing balance issues, and the bacteria had become resistent to them as well. Not long before she died, I came across bacteriophage therapy while researching potential solutions, and was planning to speak with her doctor about gathering a sample to send to a phage therapy center in Georgia where they develop custom phage cocktails to treat such cases, but during a routine hospital visit, she got pneumonia, and passed away after about two weeks in the ICU. It was a very painful and frustrating time. I really hope more phage therapy research takes place in the U.S. soon, and it can be approved by the FDA, so that the lives of people with CF, and others who become infected with antibiotic resistent bacteria can be saved. PS. The lung infection didn't cause her death directly. In the ICU, she was in an induced coma, hooked to a breathing machine and a dialysis machine while being pumped full of antibiotics. The dialysis machine was cleaning the toxins, largely caused by the antibiotics, from her blood continuously. It was too much for her heart to take after a while, so it stopped beating. The buildup of toxicity and damage that can be caused by the long-term use of certain antibiotics is yet another reason to find alternatives. Some people also have allergic reactions to the only antibiotics that can treat their infections as well, so to me, it's imperitive that alternatives like phages are vetted for safety and brought to market in the U.S. as quickly as possible.
Why you dont have a million subscribers yet is beyond me, I am not in the medical field at all and yet I find your videos fascinating and informative. Thanks for the great content.
These videos should be required watching for people in health care. I've mentioned things I've learned from Patrick to my doctors and usually get a blank stare. This is probably because they are overworked and don't have time for pedantic discussions, but I can't help myself. 😅
The general public gravitates ever more toward ‘shorts’ and TikTok nonsense. These longer form videos of what many would consider a fairly dry subject matter (as good as the host does at making it interesting) are going to be too much for a great many viewers. That, is why he doesn’t have 1m subscribers (or, more optimistically, at least yet).
@@BuddyLee23 i don't think that's a good though explanation. There's plenty of long historical/scientific videos with millions of views. I think the "problem" with this channel is that it's too niche in topics. For example without some basic knowledge in medicine a lot of things don't even make sense
The Pioneer of phage therapy ignoring good science because of personal beef and having his lab taken away despite genuine innovation is excellent proof of how science is easily corrupted by human pettiness. I wonder what instances of these problems we have but don't know about today.
Oh man, reminds me of the tragic stories of Dr Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis and Henri Dunant {social medical advances founding the Red Cross, not medicine specifically. Look their stories up if you haven't already.
This is really interesting as someone who is currently trying to find new bacteriophages. I'm part of a research group in my college looking for phages in water sources, and I haven't been successful with my water sample but some others in the group have found evidence of phage activity.
My friend with cystic fibrosis is getting bacteriophages for her because she has treatment refractory burkholderia cepacia in her lungs and its her last options. The technology is super cool.
Fighting off river tortoises to “get at” floating partially-cremated human bodies, and determining the etiology of the odd “chunky bits.” Not to mention the “locust diarrhea…” SCIENCE!! Gotta Love It!!
I remember looking at a list of virus types in middle school and thinking that phages were so much cooler. Like, most of them are just a sphere, polyhedron, or spiral, but then phages literally look like nanobots in media.
I think AI actually may have some amount of use in this, simulating the interactions between bacteria and phages, even designing those custom phages for bacteria we have alot of data on. If used right, it could effectively eliminate that issue.
Thank you I've been preaching this for over a decade but people think I'm just crazy because I'm not an actual doctor thank you for promoting this type of therapy
It makes me calm realising that we can always switch to phages if antibiotic resistance becomes too significant. It would mean that the doom scenario of widespread untreatable infections because of antibiotic resistance would be far less likely.
Bacteriophages are seriously some of the coolest viruses, both apprarance-wise and in terms of how they infect ONLY BACTERIA. They're just so cool and fascinating and it's amazing that we can use them in medicine. edit: I accidentally wrote that they infected viruses
@@xMorogothx Thanks for correcting me. I spent a lot of time learning about those little guys in high school so you'd think I'd remember their namesake 😅
I'm all for bacteriophages and have been telling people about them since I learned about them. It'd be great if a lot of research got put into the US for them.
I think there's huge potential in bacteriophage therapy in the coming decades. The specificity was previously a major downside when it was difficult to determine exactly what was making somebody sick, but it's a tractable problem these days to perform fast-turnaround cultures and automated tests (including RNA/DNA testing to identify specific strains) to figure out what pathogen is in somebody and select an appropriate treatment from a prepared library. The technology for this simply didn't exist decades ago, so antibiotics won out. Nowadays, the selectivity of bacteriophages means they'd be well-tolerated and would be much less likely to wreak havoc on the rest of the microbiome when administered. Since bacteriophages can also evolve alongside their bacterial hosts (unlike antibiotics), there's more of a chance of keeping ahead of resistance, too.
I wonder, if given a large enough library of bacterial DNA/RNA samples and corresponding phage-DNA, possibly an AI model could predict the genetic makeup of a phage that is effective against bacteria with no known phage, enabling scientists to synthesize the phage in question. Once that model is sufficiently trained, it might even be able to design phages that are effective against multiple different bacteria while still remaining harmless to humans.
@@MerrsharrThis is actually a rare use of AI within medical research that I approve of. I know that one of the ones that receives the most research fright now with biology AI is the prediction of protein shapes, because predicting the shape just based off of an amino acid list is incredibly difficult, and a single change can lead to a completely different shape.
I've been hearing about how phage therapy is just over the horizon for about 30 years now. The Soviets were doing it since at least the 1960s I believe.
This. It's perfectly suited to a public health model of care. Particularly a specialist hospital for multi-resistant or otherwise intractable infections where phage treatments would be custom prepared on site for inpatients. Come in with something like that man's ankle, go out healed.
@@mamasimmerplays4702 I'm imagining a public hospital with a library of phages in the basement and librarians coming around breeding the depleted stock 🤩
Thanks. This is Perfect for my Story set in Edwardian London before Penicillin was invented and had to look for an Alternative for my MC who gets sick following a Ferocious fight in the Sewers.
This is wonderful information, also this would explained the culture of drinking ganges water straight from the river in India. Granted it was centuries old cultures that almost certainly be harmful today because the river right now is heavily polluted by industrial waste and residential waste, unlike centuries ago.
Hey, I just want to say that I appreciate how you script your videos up to a point where someone who doesn't understand anything about this topic (me) can follow it easily, I really appreciate it.
I would love to get an understanding of how gut viruses fit into the microbiome. Your presentation moves at a lively clip, yet I don't feel firehosed after watching for the first time. Thank you for this 💙
I wonder if there's such a thing as a human mutualistic virus, we know that mutualistic viruses are a thing as mutualistic retroviruses have been found in paristic wasps so the possibility is there.
I’d love to see a video on peptide therapies! Specifically those used for psychiatric conditions like Selank and Semax have caught my attention recently, though they have uses outside of psychiatry. Your videos are wonderfully researched and presented in a manner that is easy to understand and still conveys the entire concept, and I think peptides are a subject your style will excel at presenting.
You put my nose on a gap in my knowledge. All the more perplexing as I have been taking tablets called ......phage for some time and often wondered what that part means. I sure didn't have the spare capacity of even looking it up amongst my attempts to recover from surgery followed by a range of strange things (conditions?). Now you have shown me a starting point I can pursue. Thanks!
There is a fine American novel, Arrowsmith written by Sinclair Lewis published in 1926. IMHO you and your viewers would appreciate this work because it is all about phages for medical applications.
River Ganga has been worshipped for thousands of years in India. Among Indians it has always been known that the water of Ganga has some Magical Properties which help it clean itself. Thanks to you dude that I now know the exact reason behind the scenario.
I wish this video came out when I was a teenager. Back then I was obsessed with viruses, so the idea of phage therapy appeals to me even though there are some potential risks.
Dear Patrick, thank you very much again. I think the long-span multi-episode videos, like you have done for antibiotics and alternatives, are way more interesting than single-shot ones.. I wish you also do long series of videos on other branches of pharmacology, like gastrointestinal or heart medicine...
@@sahhaf1234 You'd probably be surprised at how much more the story actually involves. Insulin plays a major role in your basic metabolism and it turns out that researching that has yielded a much better understanding of public health in general and rewrote a lot of the science around obesity.
This was a very informative video, I was aware of the bacteriophage therapy being a thing but I assumed it was a brand new concept, not going back 100 years!
The antibiotics series is over, but my supporters on Patreon got a bonus video all about the history of Neosporin. You can get access to exclusive videos, early access to future YT videos, and more by supporting me at www.patreon.com/corporis
Patrick!!! We talked about this last summer; you said you were making a phage video; I was delighted, then waited and checked, and waited and checked for MONTHS. I thought you gave up on it. The main reason I personally am waiting with bated breath, for phage therapy to become acceptable, is because I have severe allergic reactions to most antibiotics! So, yeah, the safety of phages seems much more promising, in comparison. (Did you ever skip over Eliava's murder, sooo smoothly!) All in all? Your work was so very well done, Patrick! I couldn't find a single mistake in the whole video! Kudos to you, SIR!!!
I've seen a couple RUclips videos on bacteriophage over the years but one mainstream documentary of a patient actually using the therapy as their last hope and recovering.
I remember being a biology major around '99-2000 at home watching a Discovery channel special about the Tblisi Institute Phage Library and concern of it being lost forever to deterioration because of conflict in the area. It also showed how they would harvest the sewer water near the place as part of the process to cultivate bacteriophages.
An interesting side note about viruses and animal genomes - some DNA sequences are viral inclusions that were inserted eons ago, coding for beneficial mutations. Viruses can act as splicing machines, and are proving quite effective in molecular biology in GMO research and development.
The thing im most excited with Phages isnt their use against bacterial infections, but the potential for using Virophages/microphages against viral diseases, especially HIV, HPV, or Rabies.
Sometimes it helps to confer the idea of bacteriohage to patients in a way that'd make them more receptive to it. What do people think of telling patients that you'd be receiving "a spy germ that kills the deadlier bacteria inside you"?
I like that pitch. It can also "feed" and replicate only on the target bacteria. Given the story about the Ganges water, I'm sure we have all been exposed to thousands of them. I sent a friend the video before watching with the comment "no thanks I'll just die," and I feel completely differently 30 minutes later, a testament to its quality. We hear enough about gut flora now that it should be clear some bacteria are beneficial. Why not viruses, too? Hopefully a little education is all it will take, but who knows with the amount of institutional distrust these days? "Don't need some commie tower spider virus just hit him with more Zithromax!"
The space rocket shaped one is the T4 bacteriophage. They are very good for calibrating the dosing of osmium tetroxide for electron microscopy contrast enhancements of biological samples.
@cachecollin6984 yup, Too much makes it opaque, too little and they don't show up. The right amount will reveal the hidden features and organelles inside cells, so some E coli with T4 is used on a planchet as witness sample to adjust the scanning beam energy before scanning the histological samples.
All too common. They did much the same thing to the people who promoted breeding better strains of food crops, because genetics is a fascist science, according to the politicians.
Luckily we realised pretty quick "fascist sciences" almost all... _don't work_ and the very few _that do,_ like engineering crops, are just science once you drop all the useless nazi fluff
I read about phages in a galley I found in a 99 c. book bin at the Strand Bookstore in NYC. I’m going to guess this was somewhere around 1992-1994. It was in reference to several “untreatable” infections in Romanian institutions. I no longer have the galley or even remember the proposed name of the book.
That was an awesome educational summary of the history of phages. I first heard of them some 2 decades ago from my medical friends in Sydney. I'm fascinated by how two different systems can develop two completely different approaches to bacterial control.
I am so upset right now. After my foot reconstruction surgery I got Pseudomonas bacteria, chronic osteomyelitis. After another surgery, two months on IV antibiotics, now on oral, scheduled for another surgery. It is obvious that antibiotics are not working. I am upset that I can't get phage even though I would volunteer for a trial!
Hey just wanted to let yo know that as a medical student you have the best non-teaching focused medical content on youtube in my opinion. Thanks a lot for these videos and if any of you know other creators that do medical content in a very digestible (while running or cooking) way I would love to hear it!
I just sent you an email with a proposal, I would love to help you with your project:) and medlife crisis is great, love the british acid humor! @@PatKellyTeaches
The last I heard of this the Communist Russia was doing interesting research on it. That was back in the eighties when it had relevance in my job in public health.
Very nice job on this video. Only comment was an off the cuff statement near the end of the video about "influenza phage", and I know you're aware that viruses are the cause of various type of "Flu", not bacteria. ;)
Great video. Superbugs are a real concern in my field (i work as a physician @ ICU). One little note: Wroclaw is a part of Poland, please don't refer scientist working at Hirszfeld institute as "soviet scientists" Poland was never a soviet republic, it (unfortunately) was a country in eastern block
@PatKellyTeaches This os amazing! I have been looking forward to this video! Thank you for all the effort and thpught you put into each episode. You really are a shining light of knowledge while in a dark place of ignorance!
Excellent summary of the history of Phagetherapy. I hear you saying the Antibiotics are a Western and Phages a Soviet thing. However, according to what I had read is that Phafevrherapy is still used in France at the Foreign Legion. Have no way to confirm that.
A good scientist who strives into completely unknown territory makes note of everything! Who knows? Maybe the presence of viscious corpse-eating turtles would have mattered for further studies?
CLARIFICATION: Towards the end of the video I say "There are some obstacles before we're all taking influenza-phage or something". The biggest of these obstacles is that influenza is caused by a virus, not a bacteria, so influenza-phage specifically can't exist. It was a throwaway line to end the section, but I should've been more careful with my words. Mea culpa.
Aren't there viruses that infect other viruses tho?
@@StoutShakoyup but they are very selective of targets, and the target virons will still infect and lyase the eucaryotic cells
@StoutShako nope there aren't
@@StoutShakoviruses do not have the capability of producing cell components, so a virus can’t infect another virus because there is no replication process to produce more viruses
Virophages use giant viruses to reproduce.
Using viruses against superbugs sounds like using malware against scammers by sending it to their DM.
These biological systems arent computers, they are much more evolved
@@seymourclearlyno it’s an analogy lol
@@happysloth3208correct & while viralophage are highly complex, bacterialophage have been studied for sometime. Ofcourse there's always a risk of accidentally empowering them instead of destroying them - Irrespectively the analogy is spot on considering just coz bacteria evolves, doesn't mean that we can't guide it's evolution to become less deadly as happened with the various foreign virus, bacteria living in our body without affecting us.
PS - bat's immune system are also like this, it initially evolved to combat the cancer the bats could get due to the extreme metabolic stress from flight but since then has gotten so efficient that most bacteria/virus can't bypass it.
Sounds about right lol
Man, You got an Excellent Sense of Humour 😂
Look, us academics all know those papers get a little tedious. I appreciate an interlude of a turtle battle!!
I’m so glad I’m a historian, instead of going through tedious medical research papers, I get to sift through tedious tax and census data and maybe even some random inconsequential letters between people that have been long forgotten by time!
Right - after enough 40 page papers with an average syllable count of greater than 3 you have gotta have some kind of break. Without a few turtles in your life by page 30 you can not even keep track of which paragraph your in. ALL HAIL TURTLES or ugly parasitic worms or - whatever breaks it up and lets the brain defog itself.
Exactly. Sometimes you need a hilariously gruesome story about man eating turtles to break the monotony.
Interesting enough in Russia phages are quite often used for curing pregnant women in child birth clinics as safe alternatives for antibiotics without any complications. There are preproduced cocktails of strains for many types of bacteria there - streptococcus, staphylococcus, even a supercoktails against intestine or std infections. And it works pretty well. I’m glad to know phage treatment idea becomes more popular.
There is super weird cold war politics at work here. The West rejected phage therapy in part due to its use in Soviet Russia and Georgia. It was a very absurd reason to just ignore a promising are of medicine!
Phage therapy was rejected in the west due to easy access to antibiotics. Embargos made antibiotics scarce in USSR. And even though scarce, ORSA, VRSA and MRSA resistant bacteria still showed up. Their phage program could eliminate the resistant bugs ad well as the more common ones. They could even culture phages from a patients own biome too.
Probably it is not profitable enough and curing someone once and for all is bad idea leaving corporations without stable profit. Patient should suffer until he die and feeling slight relief after buying miracle drug from beloved corporation to keep them happy for several more days to buy another portion. Subscription based therapy suppose to be next step in medicine.
Story about soviet medicine reminds me stories about mustard plaster that used in US as pointless plaster without any results or brilliant green that is yet another dye.
@@hmu958Culturing phages from one’s own biome is actually a really cool concept. I imagine it works by adding a small amount of a super-cocktail of phages, then the ones needed replicate from the sample to select for the ones you need?
So this might explains why some of the springs or even a well has some sort of healing properties in some folklores. They are literally teaming with bacteriophagies
Not likely. It's usually the high mineral content of springs that is healing.
@@ohhowfuckingoriginal Also like that sir, indeed minerals from water makes you healthier but I was referring to what my grandma's story that says back then, when dysentery outbreak was prevalent, they once drank from a specific well that does heals you like a miracle and I also heard that to not to boil it as its magic will be lost.
Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker.
It's entirely possible. It's foolish to suppose all such legends were simply based on placebo effect or superstition.
Proof that folk traditions often have some basis in empirical, but irrational, reason. Though not all, Hindus putting cow feces in wells is definitely a bad idea.
@@Psychopatz Sounds a lot like the story the River Ganges as well.
Antibiotics vs Bacteriophage is such an awesome example of why (for many reasons) collaboration is our collective key to success. imagine if the west and east had followed the science and the knowledge together. You know, instead of playing the game of whos got the bigger nuke
If they were collaborating then the West would have helped them expand antibiotics production and phages would have fallen at the wayside there too. If you want to nurture multiple solutions they often need to be kept isolated to prevent one winning everywhere.
@@agsystems8220 so capitalism is what prevents innovation
@@itsgonnabeokaiIt was competitiveness that pushed advance in science. If there were no adversity, the funding would be reduced and everyone involved would become complacent. And competition is the engine of capitalism.
@@boulderbash19700209
Competition also happens to be the engine of people so we really wouldn't be getting anything done if we had no reason to compete.
@@itsgonnabeokaithat's a pretty ignorant conclusion but go off.
Putting a little Indian context here, there is a long held Indian belief that waters of the Ganga have healing properties. There’s mythological reasons for this, Ganga being the biggest river systems in the region and being a literal mythological Goddess eminating from the matted locks of Shiva from up the Himalayas. But I can’t help but wonder if there were observational anecdotal accounts over the centuries that solidified the belief in the magical healing properties of the waters.
A shame, considering how incredibly polluted it since became.
During Covid I remember seeing video of Indians bathing in cow feces, believing that had healthy properties 🙄
I would bet there is an abundant and varied collection of phages in the Ganga ! I remember my Dad visiting Varanasi with me and he had brought from Canada a badly infected thumb which upon immersing it in the Ganga , cleared completely the next day 😃
And now you know. It's still a Miracle the River harbored Bacteriophages in Abundance
Humans throughout history have explained things with myth and religion. Truly sad. Once you decide something happens due to divine intervention, you no longer have any reason to investigate more deeply. Thus, your cultures scientific knowledge will never progress, or at best, progress very slowly, especially when the relevant religions persecute the individuals questioning the religious dogma!
"Be patient"
I don't want to be a patient 😅
Having ADHD, I can't be patient.
As someone who is not supposed to take antibiotics for medical reasons, bacteriophages as treatment really excite me. I had to research them freshman year of undergrad, I watched a talk and the ones the presenter (Paul Turner, PhD) was discussing were really interesting. When applied to the target (antibiotic resistant) bacteria, they either killed them successfully or the bacteria developed resistance to the bacteriophages *and lost their antibiotic resistance*, in which case antibiotics could be used to kill them!
At least in the US, the regulatory hurdle is by far the hardest challenge (I’d argue moreso than the science). The FDA has tracks for biologic drugs and vaccines, but not for drugs that are (nearly) living creatures.
Under the current paradigm, your evolved bacteriophages would be classified as a separate drug than the original, requiring a separate approval process, and costing another tens-hundreds of millions of dollars + most of a decade to get to market.
Phage therapy is among the clearest cases of FDA regs actively holding back medical progress.
@Lemon9234 and stem cells. Don't forget that a bunch of idiots in congress and the fda screwed the world out of that in the 90's.
We actually did a unit in class on MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) in high school biology, and then my aunt caught it the next year. The entire time, I was just thinking about how an antibiotic and phage blend likely could have cured it so much faster and with less lung damage. MRSA is a huge issue in hospitals right now, because the variety of antibiotics used within a hospital result in workers’ skin bacteria developing multiple antibiotic resistances, which makes cross contamination so much more dangerous.
D’Herelle is a GOAT. Bro just said “nah Imma just be a scientist” and did it.
My takeaway from this: scientists want to create nanobots to heal people, but we already have them.
The idea of nanobots is really funny if you learn about microbiology because nanobots already exist! They're just living cells and viruses, we just don't ever appreciate how insanely cool they are. Like your immune system isn't some boring passive thing, it's literally an army of nanobots fanatically dedicated to protecting your life, so much so that they will and often do kill themselves.
Not quite. There's nothing, directly, stopping the viruses from infecting human cells
Finally, a fellow genius. A couple years ago, I argued with our teacher then I decided to take a personal project to prove your analysis, why engineer batteries for tiny bots when viruses and enzymes are way better than that.
NANOMACHINES, SON
@@ZElphear-qv4ix Except it does not work. Immune system attacks phages after about a week or so of treatment ... makes it ineffective. It is an old idea that never worked out.
My partner had CF, and she died from complications caused by chronic bacterial lung infections several years ago at age 30.
Previously, the toxicity of the antibiotics she'd been treated with damaged her inner ears, causing balance issues, and the bacteria had become resistent to them as well.
Not long before she died, I came across bacteriophage therapy while researching potential solutions, and was planning to speak with her doctor about gathering a sample to send to a phage therapy center in Georgia where they develop custom phage cocktails to treat such cases, but during a routine hospital visit, she got pneumonia, and passed away after about two weeks in the ICU. It was a very painful and frustrating time.
I really hope more phage therapy research takes place in the U.S. soon, and it can be approved by the FDA, so that the lives of people with CF, and others who become infected with antibiotic resistent bacteria can be saved.
PS. The lung infection didn't cause her death directly. In the ICU, she was in an induced coma, hooked to a breathing machine and a dialysis machine while being pumped full of antibiotics. The dialysis machine was cleaning the toxins, largely caused by the antibiotics, from her blood continuously. It was too much for her heart to take after a while, so it stopped beating.
The buildup of toxicity and damage that can be caused by the long-term use of certain antibiotics is yet another reason to find alternatives. Some people also have allergic reactions to the only antibiotics that can treat their infections as well, so to me, it's imperitive that alternatives like phages are vetted for safety and brought to market in the U.S. as quickly as possible.
I'm sorry 😞 I think she would have been very appreciative of you. I hope phage therapy will evolve to help patients like her in the future.
Why you dont have a million subscribers yet is beyond me, I am not in the medical field at all and yet I find your videos fascinating and informative. Thanks for the great content.
These videos should be required watching for people in health care. I've mentioned things I've learned from Patrick to my doctors and usually get a blank stare. This is probably because they are overworked and don't have time for pedantic discussions, but I can't help myself. 😅
The general public gravitates ever more toward ‘shorts’ and TikTok nonsense. These longer form videos of what many would consider a fairly dry subject matter (as good as the host does at making it interesting) are going to be too much for a great many viewers. That, is why he doesn’t have 1m subscribers (or, more optimistically, at least yet).
@@BuddyLee23 i don't think that's a good though explanation. There's plenty of long historical/scientific videos with millions of views. I think the "problem" with this channel is that it's too niche in topics. For example without some basic knowledge in medicine a lot of things don't even make sense
The Pioneer of phage therapy ignoring good science because of personal beef and having his lab taken away despite genuine innovation is excellent proof of how science is easily corrupted by human pettiness. I wonder what instances of these problems we have but don't know about today.
Oh man, reminds me of the tragic stories of Dr Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis and Henri Dunant {social medical advances founding the Red Cross, not medicine specifically. Look their stories up if you haven't already.
I don't know about this version but the opposite seems to often happen: some scientist gets famous in their field and isn't questioned enough anymore
The replication crisis
@@tomlxyz like that Korean geneticist.
This is really interesting as someone who is currently trying to find new bacteriophages. I'm part of a research group in my college looking for phages in water sources, and I haven't been successful with my water sample but some others in the group have found evidence of phage activity.
The Russian pioneers of phage therapy during the cold war got many phage lines from hospital sewers.
What diffrent water sources have you checked so far?
My friend with cystic fibrosis is getting bacteriophages for her because she has treatment refractory burkholderia cepacia in her lungs and its her last options. The technology is super cool.
I seriously appreciate the "D'Herelle Went Down to Georgia" gag.
Generally amazing video as always Patrick!
Thought it might be too much of a stretch. Glad it landed 🤠
Now I can’t get that song out of my head!
I love that you announced the key research questions up front. I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t do that.
Your antibiotic series deserves an award. Ive rewatched every episode multiple times
That means a ton, thank you!
Fighting off river tortoises to “get at” floating partially-cremated human bodies, and determining the etiology of the odd “chunky bits.” Not to mention the “locust diarrhea…”
SCIENCE!!
Gotta Love It!!
Love at first sight when I first saw a bacteriophage as a kid. They're little robots, perhaps doodads.
I saw a diagram of a bacteriophage. My eyesight isn't that good.
Hahahaha, was gonna say, you've got some 2,000,000/20 vision!
I remember looking at a list of virus types in middle school and thinking that phages were so much cooler. Like, most of them are just a sphere, polyhedron, or spiral, but then phages literally look like nanobots in media.
I think AI actually may have some amount of use in this, simulating the interactions between bacteria and phages, even designing those custom phages for bacteria we have alot of data on. If used right, it could effectively eliminate that issue.
There's a lot of great applications for AI all over medical research!
You are scratching the Surface, AI will revolutionise Medicine.
Thank you I've been preaching this for over a decade but people think I'm just crazy because I'm not an actual doctor thank you for promoting this type of therapy
It makes me calm realising that we can always switch to phages if antibiotic resistance becomes too significant. It would mean that the doom scenario of widespread untreatable infections because of antibiotic resistance would be far less likely.
The anecdotes on the humanity of these scientists is hilarious but also crucial to understand the progress of science!
Bacteriophages are seriously some of the coolest viruses, both apprarance-wise and in terms of how they infect ONLY BACTERIA. They're just so cool and fascinating and it's amazing that we can use them in medicine.
edit: I accidentally wrote that they infected viruses
They only affect bacteria*
@@xMorogothx Thanks for correcting me. I spent a lot of time learning about those little guys in high school so you'd think I'd remember their namesake 😅
I'm all for bacteriophages and have been telling people about them since I learned about them. It'd be great if a lot of research got put into the US for them.
It was what I wanted to do throughout high school. However, the research is no where near FDA Approved. Now im in engineering.
I think there's huge potential in bacteriophage therapy in the coming decades. The specificity was previously a major downside when it was difficult to determine exactly what was making somebody sick, but it's a tractable problem these days to perform fast-turnaround cultures and automated tests (including RNA/DNA testing to identify specific strains) to figure out what pathogen is in somebody and select an appropriate treatment from a prepared library. The technology for this simply didn't exist decades ago, so antibiotics won out.
Nowadays, the selectivity of bacteriophages means they'd be well-tolerated and would be much less likely to wreak havoc on the rest of the microbiome when administered. Since bacteriophages can also evolve alongside their bacterial hosts (unlike antibiotics), there's more of a chance of keeping ahead of resistance, too.
I wonder, if given a large enough library of bacterial DNA/RNA samples and corresponding phage-DNA, possibly an AI model could predict the genetic makeup of a phage that is effective against bacteria with no known phage, enabling scientists to synthesize the phage in question. Once that model is sufficiently trained, it might even be able to design phages that are effective against multiple different bacteria while still remaining harmless to humans.
The human immune system does not tolerate phages ... which is why phage therapy never worked out.
@@MerrsharrThis is actually a rare use of AI within medical research that I approve of. I know that one of the ones that receives the most research fright now with biology AI is the prediction of protein shapes, because predicting the shape just based off of an amino acid list is incredibly difficult, and a single change can lead to a completely different shape.
I've been hearing about how phage therapy is just over the horizon for about 30 years now.
The Soviets were doing it since at least the 1960s I believe.
Since the 1920s, actually! I cover that about midway through the video
There may not be a capitalistic model for Phage Therapy. There certainly is a Public Health model for their use.
This. It's perfectly suited to a public health model of care. Particularly a specialist hospital for multi-resistant or otherwise intractable infections where phage treatments would be custom prepared on site for inpatients. Come in with something like that man's ankle, go out healed.
Communism 100 million death
@@mamasimmerplays4702 I'm imagining a public hospital with a library of phages in the basement and librarians coming around breeding the depleted stock 🤩
I used to work with Dr. Kutter and she had her house built to look like a bacteriophage from above! Such an interesting woman!
Thanks. This is Perfect for my Story set in Edwardian London before Penicillin was invented and had to look for an Alternative for my MC who gets sick following a Ferocious fight in the Sewers.
This is wonderful information, also this would explained the culture of drinking ganges water straight from the river in India.
Granted it was centuries old cultures that almost certainly be harmful today because the river right now is heavily polluted by industrial waste and residential waste, unlike centuries ago.
This channel got me into pharmacy and medical history. I can't wait to see more videos come out.
That means a lot, thank you. More coming soon
it's insane to me that your channel is still (relativley) small. The quality of your content is sublime, Patrick! You're doing an awesome job.
Hey, I just want to say that I appreciate how you script your videos up to a point where someone who doesn't understand anything about this topic (me) can follow it easily, I really appreciate it.
Stoked to see your stuff in my feed, Pat
Now could we make bacteria that go after viruses, instead of vice versa?
I would love to get an understanding of how gut viruses fit into the microbiome. Your presentation moves at a lively clip, yet I don't feel firehosed after watching for the first time. Thank you for this 💙
I wonder if there's such a thing as a human mutualistic virus, we know that mutualistic viruses are a thing as mutualistic retroviruses have been found in paristic wasps so the possibility is there.
I’d love to see a video on peptide therapies! Specifically those used for psychiatric conditions like Selank and Semax have caught my attention recently, though they have uses outside of psychiatry. Your videos are wonderfully researched and presented in a manner that is easy to understand and still conveys the entire concept, and I think peptides are a subject your style will excel at presenting.
You put my nose on a gap in my knowledge. All the more perplexing as I have been taking tablets called ......phage for some time and often wondered what that part means. I sure didn't have the spare capacity of even looking it up amongst my attempts to recover from surgery followed by a range of strange things (conditions?). Now you have shown me a starting point I can pursue. Thanks!
There is a fine American novel, Arrowsmith written by Sinclair Lewis published in 1926. IMHO you and your viewers would appreciate this work because it is all about phages for medical applications.
River Ganga has been worshipped for thousands of years in India. Among Indians it has always been known that the water of Ganga has some Magical Properties which help it clean itself.
Thanks to you dude that I now know the exact reason behind the scenario.
My wife has CF and we almost went to Georgia for treatment nearly 7 years ago.
Thanks Patrick, This is a big story that needs to be widely known
I wish this video came out when I was a teenager. Back then I was obsessed with viruses, so the idea of phage therapy appeals to me even though there are some potential risks.
Dear Patrick, thank you very much again. I think the long-span multi-episode videos, like you have done for antibiotics and alternatives, are way more interesting than single-shot ones.. I wish you also do long series of videos on other branches of pharmacology, like gastrointestinal or heart medicine...
Or maybe a series on Insulin… 😎
@@PatKellyTeaches The only problem with insulin is that its story is comparatively well-known.. Otherwise it will make a great video..
@@sahhaf1234 You'd probably be surprised at how much more the story actually involves. Insulin plays a major role in your basic metabolism and it turns out that researching that has yielded a much better understanding of public health in general and rewrote a lot of the science around obesity.
This was a very informative video, I was aware of the bacteriophage therapy being a thing but I assumed it was a brand new concept, not going back 100 years!
The antibiotics series is over, but my supporters on Patreon got a bonus video all about the history of Neosporin. You can get access to exclusive videos, early access to future YT videos, and more by supporting me at www.patreon.com/corporis
It's over.
Do bacteria ever loose antibiotic resistance naturally or are they permanently resistant to it without medical treatment like bacteriophage
Patrick!!! We talked about this last summer; you said you were making a phage video; I was delighted, then waited and checked, and waited and checked for MONTHS. I thought you gave up on it. The main reason I personally am waiting with bated breath, for phage therapy to become acceptable, is because I have severe allergic reactions to most antibiotics! So, yeah, the safety of phages seems much more promising, in comparison. (Did you ever skip over Eliava's murder, sooo smoothly!) All in all? Your work was so very well done, Patrick! I couldn't find a single mistake in the whole video! Kudos to you, SIR!!!
Over? Please more
@@Nostripe361well if they want to increase resistance to phages they will need to reduce antibiotic resistance
I've seen a couple RUclips videos on bacteriophage over the years but one mainstream documentary of a patient actually using the therapy as their last hope and recovering.
thank you for making me interested in medical history.
29:31 YESSSS This is the wordplay I crave from this channel 😂
Another excellent video!
I remember being a biology major around '99-2000 at home watching a Discovery channel special about the Tblisi Institute Phage Library and concern of it being lost forever to deterioration because of conflict in the area.
It also showed how they would harvest the sewer water near the place as part of the process to cultivate bacteriophages.
I didn't even know this kind of treatment was researched in my part of the world! That's so cool
Another great video, this channel deserves way more subs.
Love how the sci-fi cliché of mad scientists testing things on themselves is based in reality...
An interesting side note about viruses and animal genomes - some DNA sequences are viral inclusions that were inserted eons ago, coding for beneficial mutations. Viruses can act as splicing machines, and are proving quite effective in molecular biology in GMO research and development.
The guy who runs the channel Thought Emporium used gentically engineered viruses to cure his lactose intolerance.
The thing im most excited with Phages isnt their use against bacterial infections, but the potential for using Virophages/microphages against viral diseases, especially HIV, HPV, or Rabies.
Old lab methods are fascinating to me. Some aren't dissimilar to what I've seen in the lab, others make me wonder how tf we've made it this far.
I'll tell ya, there's a reason we don't pipette by mouth anymore
This series has been so good! I hope you find a good topic to do another series about next!
If only more RUclips videos were even close to being this good.
I agree
I am really liking the chronology of the videos which you are putting out. Great as always.
Sometimes it helps to confer the idea of bacteriohage to patients in a way that'd make them more receptive to it.
What do people think of telling patients that you'd be receiving "a spy germ that kills the deadlier bacteria inside you"?
I like that pitch. It can also "feed" and replicate only on the target bacteria. Given the story about the Ganges water, I'm sure we have all been exposed to thousands of them. I sent a friend the video before watching with the comment "no thanks I'll just die," and I feel completely differently 30 minutes later, a testament to its quality. We hear enough about gut flora now that it should be clear some bacteria are beneficial. Why not viruses, too? Hopefully a little education is all it will take, but who knows with the amount of institutional distrust these days? "Don't need some commie tower spider virus just hit him with more Zithromax!"
pretty sure when antibiotics fail to heal them, they would try almost anything anyway
Kurzgesagt did it in a pretty nice way by just never linking the word virus and bacteriophage together.
To harvest and grow bacteriophages is more costly and labour intensive process than cultivate antibiotics. I asume this is why it was abandoned.
The space rocket shaped one is the T4 bacteriophage. They are very good for calibrating the dosing of osmium tetroxide for electron microscopy contrast enhancements of biological samples.
Wow, so they are used as calibration by default?
@cachecollin6984 yup, Too much makes it opaque, too little and they don't show up. The right amount will reveal the hidden features and organelles inside cells, so some E coli with T4 is used on a planchet as witness sample to adjust the scanning beam energy before scanning the histological samples.
Alas Soviets lost another scientist to dogma
All too common. They did much the same thing to the people who promoted breeding better strains of food crops, because genetics is a fascist science, according to the politicians.
Luckily we realised pretty quick "fascist sciences" almost all... _don't work_ and the very few _that do,_ like engineering crops, are just science once you drop all the useless nazi fluff
Fascinating! You're a great presenter, Patrick!
I read about phages in a galley I found in a 99 c. book bin at the Strand Bookstore in NYC. I’m going to guess this was somewhere around 1992-1994. It was in reference to several “untreatable” infections in Romanian institutions. I no longer have the galley or even remember the proposed name of the book.
I love your videos! It helps me apply what I’m learning in microbiology and Chemistry to modern science. Keep up the brilliant work!
I may not live long enough to benefit…old lady here…but there is research into using phage therapy to treat autoimmune disorders. Very early days.
lol 😂 The joy of saying "Phage therapy was going viral"
Fascinating, thank you kindly for the video!
Boy, those were the days of personal experimentation....
I was waiting for this video. Great series Patrick!
Great video! This whole series has been great. Also Bacteriophages are awesome and they are my friend.
I love your videos, especially when things you mention line up with what I've recently read about the Pasteur Institute. Thanks for another great one.
That was an awesome educational summary of the history of phages. I first heard of them some 2 decades ago from my medical friends in Sydney.
I'm fascinated by how two different systems can develop two completely different approaches to bacterial control.
I am so upset right now. After my foot reconstruction surgery I got Pseudomonas bacteria, chronic osteomyelitis. After another surgery, two months on IV antibiotics, now on oral, scheduled for another surgery. It is obvious that antibiotics are not working. I am upset that I can't get phage even though I would volunteer for a trial!
Great video on a topic that should really be covered more.
Agreed. There are tons of videos and articles about antimicrobial resistance, but it feels like very few about phages
Hey just wanted to let yo know that as a medical student you have the best non-teaching focused medical content on youtube in my opinion. Thanks a lot for these videos and if any of you know other creators that do medical content in a very digestible (while running or cooking) way I would love to hear it!
That means a ton, thank you. Medlife Crisis is my favorite!
I just sent you an email with a proposal, I would love to help you with your project:) and medlife crisis is great, love the british acid humor! @@PatKellyTeaches
Dear Patrick, have you had a chance to look at the email I sent you?
What a great talk! I read Arrowsmith 25 years ago and wondered ever since what to phage therapy. So well done sir!
I'm an engineering student, but I've been finding myself watching all of your videos because they're so interesting! Great videos.
This is really well told story of the history of bacteriaphages. Incredibly interesting and Kelly's enthusiasm for his topic is "infectious"
The last I heard of this the Communist Russia was doing interesting research on it. That was back in the eighties when it had relevance in my job in public health.
I knew the Soviets were big into phage therapy but I am happy you provided details of the history of the research, the details are fascinating.
Very nice job on this video. Only comment was an off the cuff statement near the end of the video about "influenza phage", and I know you're aware that viruses are the cause of various type of "Flu", not bacteria. ;)
Great video. Superbugs are a real concern in my field (i work as a physician @ ICU). One little note: Wroclaw is a part of Poland, please don't refer scientist working at Hirszfeld institute as "soviet scientists" Poland was never a soviet republic, it (unfortunately) was a country in eastern block
This is such an incredible video. Thank you.
@PatKellyTeaches This os amazing! I have been looking forward to this video! Thank you for all the effort and thpught you put into each episode. You really are a shining light of knowledge while in a dark place of ignorance!
Glad things finally came together! It was a fascinating one to research
Awesome video! Subscribed
Thanks for the kind words!
I've always found early 20th century scientist drama fascinating.
And there's plenty of it!
Excellent summary of the history of Phagetherapy.
I hear you saying the Antibiotics are a Western and Phages a Soviet thing. However, according to what I had read is that Phafevrherapy is still used in France at the Foreign Legion. Have no way to confirm that.
Isn't that going to make people sicker!
I've never even heard of this thanks for the video
29:31 YESSSS This is the wordplay I crave from this channel
Another excellent video!
Discovered your channel today during school, and i can't stop watching. Thank you
What we mustn't forget to develop viralphages either
Yes, I've been waiting for this!
Wow, That's a Lot of Information, Thank You
A good scientist who strives into completely unknown territory makes note of everything! Who knows? Maybe the presence of viscious corpse-eating turtles would have mattered for further studies?
I saw a programme on the BBC about this subject around 25 years ago when I was 15, fascinating stuff
what a great series, keep up the amazing work