This Winnipeg scientist is using viruses to fight drug-resistant superbugs

Steven Theriault is convinced he has the solution to an urgent global public health threat — antibiotic resistance.

But he can't get his bacteria-killing viruses approved through what he calls Canada's rigid and outdated regulatory system.

"The next big focus in science is actually genetics and live organisms. … I think we're going to create some really interesting therapies and technologies," he said during a recent CBC News visit to his lab.

"Hopefully in the future, the Canadian government will ... change the regulatory process, because this is actually something that will save lives in Canada as well as treat our animal flocks in Canada. And right now, we can't use it."

Theriault is a former paramedic who got his PhD in molecular genetics and virology and then spent 15 years working on projects like the Ebola vaccine at Canada's only Level 4 National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg. He left in 2018 to start his own biotech company, Cytophage.

His research involves phages — or viruses of bacteria — which work by binding themselves to a bacteria and injecting their genetic information inside, creating more of themselves until they burst out of the bacteria, looking for more hosts to kill.

Phages were discovered in 1915 and were used to treat cholera during the 1927 epidemic, but the emergence of antibiotics in the 1940s eclipsed them. That is, until the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The problem is, they are highly targeted — individual phages are very specific to their hosts. That's where Theriault and his team come in: they have been able to modify and genetically engineer phages that will attack a range of bacteria. 

WATCH | A closer look at the work being done in Steven Theriault's lab:

While that may sound frightening, Theriault says there's no known way to perform gain of function research that would enable bacteriophages to cause disease in people.  

"It can only be weaponized against bacteria; cannot be weaponized against humans," he explained. "Doesn't infect human cells, doesn't infect animal cells. And you probably have about 100 trillion of them all over you right now."

Theriault believes bacteriophages are an answer to antibiotic resistance, which the World Health Organization (WHO) says is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security and development, associated with nearly five million deaths in 2019.

He's not the only one who believes that. Research being done at places like the University of Toronto, UC San Diego and the U.S. National Institutes of Health suggests "phage therapy has the potential to be used as either an alternative or a supplement to antibiotic treatments" and may be an alternative to antibiotics in the era of drug-resistant pathogens.

The main cause of this resistance is antibiotic overuse in humans and animals, which kills some bacteria but allows others to mutate and develop defence mechanisms. A growing number of infections, including pneumonia, tuberculosis, gonorrhea and salmonella, are becoming more difficult to treat as the antibiotics are less effective on resistant superbugs.