Transcript

INTERVIEWER

Some of the press have picked up on this study and this paper and reported it as being this might be a way to address the big problem with antibiotic resistance. Do you think that that is a plausible channel?

PROFESSOR SOCKETT

So I think this could be good for injected antibiotic resistance clearance at sites in the body. At a surgical site- so if there's an infected wound site- we might inject the Bdellovibrio into that position in one site in the body, rather than necessarily take it into the gut. This won't be like a drug where you take it orally and it spreads throughout the whole of your body and removes bacteria at all different sites. But because these Bdellovibrio are alive, and because they do tackle antibiotic-resistant bacteria naturally, they can change as the antibiotic-resistant bacteria change. So it's a living therapy.

INTERVIEWER

And does that get around the possibility that the bacteria they're attacking, such as Shigella, might develop resistance to Bdellovibrio in the first place?

PROFESSOR SOCKETT

Yes, because if, say, there is a resistant strain, you could always co-culture it in the lab with Bdellovibrio and select for Bdellovibrio that get around the resistance it develops. But the Bdellovibrio themselves use hundreds of enzymes to degrade the bacteria. So it's not like a drug with a single target, it's a system of lots of different methods. It's like having lots of weapons and using them all at once on the pathogen. So that's a good thing.