Revolutionizing Tuberculosis Treatment: Exploring Phage-Mycobacteria Interactions for Phage Therapy
A cryo-electron tomography image shows mycobacteriophages infecting a Mycobacterium smegmatis cell (left), with a 3D rendering providing a detailed view of the interaction (right).
Scripps Fellow Raphael Park at Scripps Research aims to provide a structural understanding of host-phage interactions to accelerate phage therapy against tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis (TB) remains the leading cause of death from infectious diseases worldwide. The rise of drug-resistant strains of M. tuberculosis, the causative agent of TB, underscores the urgent need for new therapeutic options to prevent a potential pandemic of drug-resistant TB. Phage therapy, which involves administering virulent phages directly to patients to kill bacterial pathogens, is gaining attention as a promising alternative to antibiotics. However, a lack of basic understanding currently limits the advancement of phage therapy into clinical trials and its adoption as standard medical practice. The Park lab at Scripps Research seeks to overcome this barrier by advancing knowledge of therapeutic phages through structural studies and developing innovative high-resolution imaging methods to investigate phage-M. tuberculosis interactions in clinically relevant contexts.
