Azeen Ghorayshi, Buzzfeed News
Scientists have long dismissed “phage therapy” as a fringe idea pushed by eccentrics who enjoy fishing in sewage. But now the Navy is betting on it.
Two days after walking through the pyramids, Tom Patterson got very sick. The psychiatry professor was in Egypt with his wife on one of their many adventurous vacations away from life in California. One minute he was fine, hamming it up in a touristy horse-and-buggy ride across the desert. The next, he couldn’t stop sweating and vomiting.
The 300-pound 68-year-old was airlifted from a clinic in Cairo to one in Frankfurt and then finally back to San Diego, where doctors confirmed a severe infection in his abdomen.
The culprit was a bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii, the notorious “Iraqibacter” that emerged in military medical facilities during the Iraq War. It now tops the international list of dangerous superbugs that don’t respond to most antibiotics. Some Iraqibacter cases improve with a very old, last-resort antibiotic called colistin. But it didn’t work on Tom.
The infection soon spread to Tom’s blood and lungs. For months he was in a San Diego ICU bed in excruciating pain, often hallucinating, falling in and out of a coma. By late February of 2016, his doctors said they were out of options.
Tom’s wife, Steffanie Strathdee, is the director of UC San Diego’s Global Health Institute, and one of the world’s experts on how HIV spreads across the world. She deeply understood how superbugs, left unchecked, would kill millions of people — including, suddenly, her husband.
Sitting in the hospital room, she turned to Tom. “Honey, the antibiotics aren’t working,” she recalled saying. “I need to know from you if you want to keep fighting, because I don’t want to keep you alive just for me. Squeeze my hand if you want me to push ahead.” He squeezed.
Over the next seven months, Steffanie went on a remarkable medical quest, and one that might not have been possible if not for her unique position in the upper echelon of academic science. She gained access to a century-old treatment — “phage therapy” — in which a patient gets custom-made viruses to kill their festering infection. And she and her colleagues found these viruses, called phages, in a surprising place: a heavily guarded Maryland lab run by the US Navy.