UK scientists developing nose cream to fight MRSA

A virus-laden cream that is stuffed up the noses of hospital patients to prevent the spread of MRSA could be available in two years, it was revealed today.

British scientists are at an advanced stage of developing the cream, which contains a cocktail of viruses that target the superbug bacteria.

Clinical trials are planned next year following promising laboratory tests in which the viruses wiped out more than 15 strains of MRSA.

If successful, the virus cream could be on the market in two to three years.

Dr Nick Housby, chief executive of the Coventry-based biotech company Novolytics, which is carrying out the research, said: “We’re extremely optimistic. We know we can kill, in the laboratory, clinically relevant strains. It’s a question now of putting it into the right cream, in terms of the formulation, to make sure that it works.”

The cream contains a “cocktail” of three or four different types of virus mixed into it.

Once in the nose, the viruses will target and latch onto MRSA bacteria, injecting them with their own genetic material.

The bugs are reprogrammed to produce more viruses, which then break out of their host, destroying it in the process.

Since the viruses reproduce themselves, repeat treatments will not be needed as frequently as with antibiotics. The cream will also be much cheaper to produce than conventional treatments.

Shedding of MRSA from the nose, either by sneezing or transferring the bugs to the hands, is the main way the bacteria spread. When they infect the wounds of a surgical patient they can cause severe illness which may lead to death.

The virus cream is the latest example of a resurrection of interest in bacteriophages, or “phages”, viruses which destroy bacteria but appear to be harmless to humans.

They are being touted as a possible solution to the growing problem of bacterial resistance to antibiotics.

The hospital superbug MRSA, methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is just one of a gathering army of microbes rapidly becoming immune to antibiotic medicines.

Others include resistant strains of tuberculosis, the food bug Escherichia coli, and two more causes of hospital infections, Acinetobacter and Pseudomonas.

Many experts believe the era of antibiotics, which began with Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1945, may now be drawing to a close.

The use of phages to fight bacterial infection actually has a longer history, but after the invention of antibiotics was largely forgotten – at least in the West.

Ten years before the arrival of penicillin, in 1919, a microbiologist called Felix d’Herelle successfully used bacteria viruses to treat dysentery patients in France. This was 20 years before the electron microscope allowed scientists to see viruses for the first time.

However, phages failed to live up to their early promise. Phage treatments were difficult to prepare and a number of patients taking part in studies died, largely because the products they were given were too toxic.

When antibiotics appeared, attention turned away from bacteria viruses in the West. Not only were antibiotics phenomenally successful, but they were much easier to patent than phages and therefore more profitable for drug companies.

But research into phages stormed ahead in the Soviet Union, where they came to be routinely used for treating bacterial infections. At one time a manufacturing plant in Georgia produced tons of phage preparations daily for export throughout the USSR. One of the biggest customers was the Soviet Army, which equipped all its soldiers with phage kits for treating wounds. In Poland, doctors had great success treating cholera outbreaks with phages.

Phages are now starting to make a come back in the West, where more than 12 companies are now developing phage products. Most are focusing on veterinary treatments, and sterilisation and food safety applications, all of which can be brought to market more quickly than medicinal therapies.

Phage expert Professor Geoff Hanlon, from the University of Brighton, said: “Now the wheel has turned in that we’re now finding antibiotics are becoming less and less useful. The climate is probably right to revisit bacteriophage therapy.”

One company, Biocontrol Ltd, is currently running a trial at a London hospital of phage therapy for resistant Pseudomonas ear infections. There are also plans to import ready made treatments from the Eliava institute in Georgia, the world’s largest phage research centre. In the US the Food and Drink Administration has approved a phage therapy against listeria, and is looking at a treatment for resistant E. coli 0157.

Dr Housby said the aim was to use the phage cream as a preventative measure which would be given to patients a day or two before they go into hospital.

It would be applied with a stick inserted into the nose similar to those already employed to treat patients with hospital infection antibiotics.

“You would use a little stick applicator to push the cream up your nose, release the cream, and then massage your nose using two fingers,” said Dr Housby, speaking at a briefing on phages at the Science Media Centre in London. “That will then move the cream into the right place.”