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[Music]
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A war has been raging for billions of years,
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killing trillions every single day, while we don't even notice.
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The war is fought by the single deadliest entity on our planet:
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the bacteriophage
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or 'phage' for short.
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[Intro + Music]
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A phage is a virus;
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not quite alive,
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not quite dead.
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Also, they look as if someone made them up.
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Their head is an icosahedron,
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a sort of dice with 20 faces and 30 edges.
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It contains the genetic material of the virus
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and often sits on a long tail that has leg-like fibers.
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There are more phages on earth than every other organism combined,
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including bacteria.
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And they are probably everywhere living things exist.
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Billions are on your hands, in your intestines and your eyelids right now.
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Which might make you nervous since phages are responsible for the majority of deaths on earth
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but you're lucky.
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While they do commit genocide for breakfast,
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they only kill bacteria.
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Up to 40% of all bacteria in the oceans are killed by them every single day.
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But phages also have major flaws.
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Like any other virus, phages need a host to survive and reproduce.
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They're not much more than genetic material in a hull
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and they specialize.
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Usually, a phage has chosen one specific bacteria
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and maybe some of its very close relatives.
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These are its prey.
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Imagine a phage as like a cruise missile that only hunts and kills members of one very unlucky family.
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When a phage finds its victim,
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it connects its tail fibers with receptors and uses a sort of syringe to puncture a surface.
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In a weird motion, the phage squeezes its tail and injects its genetic information.
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Within minutes, the bacteria is taken over.
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It's now forced to manufacture all the parts of new phages.
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They only stop when the bacteria is filled up with brand-new phages.
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In the final step,
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they produce 'endolysin',
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a powerful enzyme that punches a hole in the bacteria.
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The pressure is so high that the bacteria sort of vomits out all of its insides and dies.
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New phages are released and begin the cycle anew.
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In the last few years,
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bacteriophages have enjoyed the attention of the second deadliest beings on earth:
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humans.
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Recently, we've started looking into injecting millions of them into our bodies
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because we're sort of getting desperate;
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we screwed up.
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In the past a single cut or a sip from the wrong puddle could kill you.
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Bacteria were our phages.
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Tiny monsters that hunted us mercilessly.
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But then, about 100 years ago, we found a solution in nature.
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By accident, we found fungi that produced compounds that killed bacteria:
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antibiotics.
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Suddenly, we had a powerful super weapon.
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Antibiotics were so effective that we stopped thinking of bacteria as monsters.
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Only the old and the weakest among us were killed by them.
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We used antibiotics more and more for less and less serious causes.
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We lost respect for the monsters and the weapon
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But bacteria are living things that evolve and one by one they started to become immune against our weapons.
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This continued until we had created what are called 'superbugs',
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bacteria immune to almost everything we have.
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This immunity is spreading across the world as we speak.
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By 2050, superbugs could kill more humans a year than cancer.
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The days when a cut or bladder infection or a cough could kill you or your loved ones are coming back.
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In the US alone, more than 23,000 people die from resistant bacteria each year.
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But it turns out that phages, our tiny killer virus robots, could save us.
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We can inject them into our bodies to help cure infections.
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Hold on, how could injecting millions of viruses into an infection be a good idea?
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Phages are very very specialized killers of bacteria.
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So specialized, in fact, that humans are completely immune to them;
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we are too different.
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We encounter billions of phages every day and we just politely ignore each other.
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Antibiotics are like carpet bombing, killing everything even the good bacteria in our intestines that we don't want to harm
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Phages are like guided missiles that only attack what they're supposed to
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Wait a minute, if we use phages to kill bacteria, won't bacteria develop ways of defending themselves?
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Well, it's more complex than that; phages evolved too.
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There has been an arms race between them and bacteria for billions of years and so far, they're doing great.
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This makes phages smart weapons that are constantly getting better at killing.
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But even if bacteria were to become immune against our phage, we still might be able to win.
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It turns out that in order to become resistant to even just a few species of phages,
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bacteria have to give up their resistance to antibiotics.
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We might be able to trap them in a catch-22.
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This has already been successfully tested with a patient who had no other hope left
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The bacteria 'Pseudomonas Aeruginosa', one of the most feared bacteria, infected the man's chest cavity.
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They are naturally resistant to most antibiotics
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and can even survive an alcoholic hand gel.
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After years of suffering, a few thousand phages were directly inserted into his chest cavity
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together with antibiotics the bacteria were immune to.
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After a few weeks, the infections had completely disappeared.
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Unfortunately, this treatment is still experimental and pharma companies are still reluctant to invest the necessary billions
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in a treatment that has no official approval yet.
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But things are finally changing.
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In 2016, the largest phage clinical trial to date began and phages are getting more and more attention.
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and we better get used to it because the era in which antibiotics have been our super weapon is drawing to a close.
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It might be a weird concept but injecting the deadliest being on planet Earth
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directly into our bodies could save millions of lives
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This video was made possible by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
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If you'd like to support Kurzgesagt, you can do so on patreon.com/Kurzgesagt and get fancy things in return.9263
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