On March 22, 2016, a 30-year-old Belgian woman was at Brussels airport when an Islamist terrorist attack rocked the place. The explosion killed 35 people, including three of the suicide bombers. The woman was rushed to Erasmus Hospital in Brussels, but her condition was critical: her heart had stopped beating and she needed to be resuscitated. Doctors amputated part of her hip and performed an urgent operation to save her leg.
But after a while, the woman suffered an infection in her left thigh caused by a bacterium called Klebsiella pneumoniae, which had become resistant to all available antibiotics. The bacterium belongs to a group known as ESKAPE, made up of six species of microorganisms resistant to the most dangerous antibiotics, according to the World Health Organization. These infections are one of the biggest threats to global health and are expected to kill 10 million people per year by 2050.
Doctors realized that the bacteria could be more dangerous to the patient’s life than the bomb that nearly killed her. After two years of suffering from continuous infections, the medical team decided to try an experimental treatment using specialized bacteria-killing viruses, known as phages, which are used as a last resort.
The team analyzed the genome of the bacteria infecting the patient and began searching for a phage capable of killing it. Once they found the right phage, they prepared it and administered it directly to the infected area. The combined phage and antibiotic treatment eliminated the infection completely. Three years after treatment, the woman has regained much of her mobility and can walk with the help of crutches and even participate in sporting events, according to her doctors in the study published in Nature Communications.