Phage therapy is utilizing bacteriophage to target foreign bacteria, to my understanding. So, theoretically, would it be possible to program them to target senescent cells which build up due to age?

Comments

Phoenix5869 t1_je3gi3f wrote on March 29, 2023 at 3:15 AM

i’m not an expert so i could be wrong, but i don’t think it works like that. Bacteriophages are specially designed to seek and destroy bacteria, and i don’t think they will work on cells. Could be wrong tho

TheRappingSquid OP t1_je3tsk8 wrote on March 29, 2023 at 5:26 AM

Well not naturally no, I figured with some sort of augmentations ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I think they were trying to use them against cancer cells at one point but I could be wrong

DiscipleOfLucy t1_je51aod wrote on March 29, 2023 at 1:49 PM

Oncolytic Viral Therapies exist, but they don’t use phages because phages are specialized for bacteria. One therapy for melanoma uses a modified Herpes virus for example.

TheRappingSquid OP t1_je7w8t9 wrote on March 30, 2023 at 1:24 AM

Herpes? That's pretty interesting :O

NecessaryCelery2 t1_je3ctce wrote on March 29, 2023 at 2:44 AM

I am not sure, I think several gene therapies in the work and it's worth looking how they target cells. I know the Covid vaccines too were supposed to target some and not other cells.