• Question: Are you doing research on bacteriophages because i am wondering if they can be used as a cure the common cold.

    Asked by anon-251319 on 21 Apr 2020.
    • Photo: Freya Harrison

      Freya Harrison answered on 21 Apr 2020:

      I am helping out some colleagues who work on bacteriophages. Bacteriophages (or phages for short) are viruses that kill bacteria, and I work on bacteria that are very hard to kill with antibiotics – so they are very good targets for trying to kill with phage. My colleagues find phages and study them, and I help them grow bacteria for them to test the phages against.
      Unfortunately phages can’t be used to cure the common cold, because colds are caused by viruses and phages only kill bacteria. But phages have been used to cure people who have wounds that have become infected with bacteria – for instance, burns or the wounds left after surgery. And they have also been used to cure people with bacterial infection in their lungs. Using phages is still a very new area in the UK, but in some other countries (like Georgia) phages are more commonly used to treat infections.

    • Photo: Wei Xun

      Wei Xun answered on 21 Apr 2020:

      While we wait for a immunologist to answer this, I can set out some background info.

      What we may think of as one thing – The Common Cold, is actually a big mixture of hundreds of different strains of viruses and bacteria that are not flu (so non-influenza). These are grouped together as “a cold” because a) they all affect the respiratory system and b) they don’t tend to make you very ill for a long time, for instance you are much less likely to get pneumonia (lung infection which can be fatal) after a cold, than flu or the currently circulating coronavirus.

      Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria, which is responsible for only a small proportion of colds. But if we find the right phages, it is possible that they can be used to treat bacterial infections that do not respond to drugs (this is called antibiotic resistance).

      I said earlier that the common cold is made up of different things, it turns out 50% of colds are caused by a group of viruses called rhinovirus (rhino=nose). There are around 160 strains of rhinovirus known to cause colds, and each one will need a vaccine. Then, to prevent you getting a cold though, you will have to take the vaccines for the most likely strains that’s going around in any particular year, let’s say half of all known strains (that’s 80 strains) mixed together. To compare, the flu vaccine you get every year contains 3 strains of flu each time. So you can see how it is that scientists are still trying to work out what is the best thing to do.

    • Photo: Varun Ramaswamy

      Varun Ramaswamy answered on 21 Apr 2020:

      I know what you’re thinking and I love that idea. Yes, bacteriophages infect and kill bacteria, so indeed we can use them to attack and kill the bacteria that infect us.
      But the common cold is not caused by a bacteria. It comes from a viruses- either rhinoviruses, or influenza viruses or even certain types of coronaviruses.
      Unfortunately the bacteriophage can’t fight off human viruses 🙁

      Phages are being used in finding a treatment for several, far deadlier bacterial infections though, like Acinobacter. This bacterium is multi-drug resistant, which means NO antibiotic will work on it AT ALL! Recently, scientists tried using phage therapy and managed to successfully kill this bacterium and cure the infection! 🙂

    • Photo: Donna MacCallum

      Donna MacCallum answered on 21 Apr 2020:

      I don’t work on bacteriophage, but they are being investigated as a cure for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections (such as leg lesions that won’t heal or even C. difficile infections).

      When penicillin was being discovered other countries were investigating bacteriophage to treat bacterial infections – treatments could have looked very different!!

      Note that the common cold is caused by viruses including rhinovirus (causes 30–80% of colds), and human coronaviruses (NOT COVID-19) (≈ 15%), influenza viruses (10–15%),adenoviruses (5%),and others. Bacteriophage only attack bacteria.

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