Viruses pulled from sewage helped save a man dying of a superbug

Physicians at the University of California San Diego faced a patient with disseminated Acinetobacter baumannii, a drug-resistant bacterium, worsening over four months despite repeated antibiotic courses and drainage procedures, and turned to bacteriophages, viruses that infect and kill specific bacteria, as a last resort.

Two laboratories screened environmental and sewage-derived phage collections and identified nine different bacteriophages able to kill the patient's specific bacterial strain. Clinicians infused this personalized phage cocktail intravenously and directly into abscess cavities, and the patient's downward course reversed; the antibiotic minocycline was added four days later, and the infection cleared.

This was a single patient treated under emergency compassionate use, not a controlled trial, so it cannot show how often phage therapy works or in whom. The case nonetheless became one of the most cited demonstrations that custom-matched phage cocktails could treat an infection modern antibiotics could not, and it helped drive renewed clinical interest in phage therapy for drug-resistant infections in the years since.

Custom viruses, matched to one man's infection.