The head is an icosahedron a sort of dice with 20 faces and 30 edges. It contains the genetic material of the virus and often sits on a long tail that has leg-like fibres. There are more phages on Earth than every other organism combined, including bacteria. And they are probably every where living things exist. Billions are on your hands, in your intestines and your eyelids right now which might make you nervous since phages are responsible for the majority of deaths on Earth but you're lucky. While they do commit genocide for breakfast, they only kill bacteria.
Upto 40% of all bacteria in the ocean are killed by them every single day. But phages also have major flaws. Like any other virus, phages need a host to survive and reproduce. They are not much than genetic material in a hull and they specialize. Usually, a phage has chosen one specific bacteria and maybe some of its very close relatives. These are its prey. Imagine a phage as like a cruise missile that only hunts and kills members of one very unlucky family.
When a phage finds its victim, it connects its tail fibers with receptors and uses a sort of syringe to puncture a surface. In a weird motion, the phage squeezes its tail and injects it's genetic information. Within minutes, the bacteria is taken over. Its now forced to manufacture all the parts of new phages. They only Stop when the bacteria is filled up with band new phages. In the final step, they produce 'endolysin', a powerful enzyme that produces a hole in the bacteria. The pressure is so high that the bacteria sort of vomits out all its insides and dies.
New phages are released and begin the cycle anew. In the last few years, bacteriophage have enjoyed the attention of second deadliest beings on Earth: HuMaNs. Recently, we've starting looking into injecting millions of them into our bodies because we're sort of getting desperate; we screwed up.
Antibiotics were so effective that we stopped thinking of bacteria as monsters. Only the old and the weakest among us were killed by them. We used antibiotics more and more for less and less serious causes. But bacteria are living things that evolve and one by one they started to become immune against our weapons. This continued until we had created what are called 'superbugs', bacteria immune to almost everything we have.
This immunity is spreading across the world as we speak. By 2050, superbugs could kill more humans a year than Cancer! The days when we cut or bladder infection or a cough could kill you or your loved ones are coming back. In the US alone, more than 23000 people die from resistant bacteria each year.
But it turns out that phages could save us. We can inject them into our bodies to help cure infections. Phages are very-very specialized killers of bacteria.
So specialized, in fact, that humans are completely immune to them; we are too different. We encounter billions of phages everyday and we just politely ignore each one of them. Antibiotics are like carpet bombing, killing everything even the good bacteria in our intestines that we don't want to harm. Phages are like guided missiles that only attack on what they're supposed to.
But what if bacteria develop ways to defending themselves from phages? Well, its more complex than that; phages evolved too. There has been an arms race between them and bacteria for billions of years and so far, they're doing great. But even if bacteria were to become immune against our phage, we still might be able to win. It turns out that in order to become resistant to even just a few species of phages, bacteria have to give up their resistance to antibiotics. We might be able to trap them in catch-22.
This has already been successfully tested with a patient who had no other hope left. The bacteria 'Pseudomonas Aeruginosa', one of the most feared bacteria infected the man's chest cavity.
They are naturally resistant to most antibiotics and can even survive in alcoholic hand gel. After years of suffering, a few thousand phages were directly inserted into his chest cavity together with antibiotics the bacteria were immune to. After a few weeks, the infections had completely disappeared. Unfortunately, this treatment is still experimental and Pharma companies are still reluctant to invest the necessary billions in a treatment that has no official approval yet.
But things are finally changing. In 2016, the largest phage clinical trial to date began and phages are getting more and more attention and we better get used to it because the era in which antibiotics have been our super weapon is drawing to a close.
It might be a weird concept but injecting the deadliest being on planet Earth directly into our bodies could save millions of lives.
