00:00 Hospital
shots - Woman on trolley
Corridor
with Priest walking
Patient
in bed
Close-up
of drug entry site
Nurse
taking out medicines
Close
up of prescription drugs
Bottles
in lab
Scientist
working in lab
Guide Voice: The spread of Methicillin
resistant staphylococcus aureus, more commonly known as the MRSA
superbug, is now at an all time high in our hospitals.
It is responsible for the vast majority of serious hospital
infections; a true super bug that can only be controlled by one
antibiotic and is fast becoming immune to that.
Making new antibiotics can take anywhere up to 15 years of
research, development & clinical trials which is why scientists
at the University of Warwick in the UK are looking at other ways to
combat MRSA.
00:34 SOT: Professor Nicholas Mann
- "People are familiar with the concept of germs.
But basically there are two really distinct kinds of germs - there
are bacteria which are living cells just like you and me. Or there
are viruses which are essentially inert biological entities but
they can infect living cells and damage them. And what we're
looking at are these specific viruses or bacteriophages, we call
them phages for short which can infect bacterial
cells."
01:02 Laboratory
equipment shots
Guide Voice: Phage therapy has come at a
crucial time. Scientists believe the over-prescribing of
antibiotics in the last 50 years will lead to them all becoming
useless in just over a decade.
01:14 SOT: Professor Nicholas Mann -
"Forty years ago antibiotics were being discovered very
rapidly. But now the rate at which new antibiotics is being
discovered has dramatically slowed down. And usually within a year
of a new antibiotic being introduced one finds bacteria which are
resistant to it. And so we've had this continual race between
discovering antibiotics and the bacteria becoming resistant. And
now it looks as if the bacteria are winning that
race."
01:38 Shot
of scientist streaking a petri dish
Guide Voice: Phage therapy is not a new
concept.
01:41 SOT: Professor Nicholas Mann -
"There was a lot of interest in the twenties and thirties
in developing phage therapy but there was a lot of very poor
science done. There were phage therapy products which didn't
actually have any phage in them or had the wrong phage in them or
were used to treat the wrong infection. And with the advent of
antibiotics in the forties phage therapy soon became scientific
archaeology."
02:01 Laboratory
shots - Scientists at work
Guide Voice: The scientists at the University
of Warwick are so confident in their research that they have set-up
a company called Novolytics specifically to promote phage
therapy.
02:11 SOT: Professor Nicholas Mann -
"Novolytics hopes to do some basic science on phages which
infect stapphoreus and then to develop these phages as a
therapeutic product."
02:20 Petri
dish
Guide Voice: But how exactly does it work?
02:23 SOT: Faith Burden, PhD student, University of
Warwick - "The phage attaches on the outer
membrane of the bacteria. It then injects its DNA into the
bacterial host and after multiplying many thousands of times
possibly this causes the bacteria to burst open because the
bacteria can't hold so many virus particles."
02:43 Still
of phage
Guide Voice: The DNA of the virus kills the
bacteria.
02:47 Shots
of patient having her wound dressed
Guide Voice: Novolytics hopes to incorporate
the bacteriophages into healthcare products such as wound dressings
in hospitals.
02:53 Faith Burden, PhD student, University of Warwick
speaking over shots of bandage being applied -
"For example you'd have a virus impregnated in a wound
dressing. So we've got a patient with a nasty wound on their leg
for example, so you could put the wound dressing onto the leg, onto
the site of infection. We only have to get one phage into that
wound site. Once that phage has attached to the nasty bug that's
causing the infection, that good virus can then go into the bug,
multiply and then burst open. And then many of those viruses can
then be released and then it can go into a different bacteria that
we might have in that wound. It's a very simple method but it works
very well."
03:31 close-up
of wound dressing on legs
Guide Voice: If the University of Warwick is
successful in their development of phage therapy MRSA could soon be
a thing of the past.
03:38 SOT: Professor Nicholas Mann -
"I think now is a particularly appropriate time in view of
speading antibiotic resistance to look at phage therapy and
re-evaluate it properly to see whether its going to help people
develop new methods of treating bacterial
infections."
00:01 Second
black
04:10 Short
graphic sequence to illustrate phage introducing DNA to bacteria
(suitable to illustrate sound bite at
02:23)
04:28 Ends
