AIBRIEF
A 65 year old transplant recipient in California was given viruses engineered to carry CRISPR payloads against a drug resistant E. coli infection, and a stubborn bladder mass halved within a week.
A 65-year-old kidney transplant recipient in California developed a severe drug-resistant E. coli infection in the months after surgery. The infection produced a bladder mass that grew to 0.74 litres, large open abdominal wounds, and resisted the standard antibiotics the treating team had tried. Clinicians then turned to an experimental personalized therapy built by Denmark-based company SNIPR: a cocktail of bacteriophages, viruses that infect and kill bacteria, each one engineered to carry a CRISPR payload designed to chew up specific pieces of the bacteria's DNA.
Within a week of starting the phage treatment, the open abdominal wounds began healing and the mass had halved in size, falling from 0.74 litres to 0.37 litres. The patient had also been started on a new, more powerful antibiotic cocktail 11 days before the phage therapy began. The case paper's authors, including SNIPR co-author Eric van der Helm, say the result is more likely explained by the two treatments working together. "It could be that the phages together with the antibiotics had this synergistic effect," van der Helm said.
The working explanation is that the engineered phages broke up the thick bacterial biofilms that antibiotics on their own cannot penetrate, letting the new drugs reach bacteria they otherwise could not reach. The outcome is one patient, not a trial result, and clinical use of CRISPR-armed phages against bacterial infections remains years away.