One to watch: Steven Theriault’s research on bacteriophages has put him at the cutting edge of a potential bio-medical revolution
The Financial Post takes a look at 11 people and companies we’ll be watching closely in the new year.
Bacteriophages, or phages for short, are Mother Nature’s ultimate assassins: good guy viruses, existing everywhere and too numerous to count, that evolved over the millennia to kill bacteria. To kill bacteria, a phage must be matched to it, making them apex predators — think: lions to zebras — though of a highly specialized sort.
Earlier this year, the Council of Canadian Academies released a 268-page report with an ominous title: When Antibiotics Fail. Scarier still were the facts in the report, such as: approximately 5,400 Canadians in 2018 died as a direct result of so-called superbugs, while the hit to the economy, due to deaths and illnesses associated with drug-resistant infections, rang in at $2 billion.
By the time of d’Herelle’s death in 1949, penicillin had emerged as a wonder drug, and the way of the future. Phage therapy, outside the former Soviet Union, slid to the fringes, until another Canadian — this time an Anglophone from east-end Toronto — surfaced with a miraculous story to tell. Strathdee told her story to journalists and later wrote a book, The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug. Meanwhile, phages had a viral moment, publicly, so much so that a forgotten treatment method, discovered a century ago by an egomaniac French-Canadian, entered the conversation around how best to combat bacterial infections in the age of compromised antibiotics.
The family grows its own food and is famous among a small circle of people for their canned sour cherries, as well as the garlic-flavoured pepperette sticks Theriault prepares from deer meat.For kicks, Theriault rock climbs; for rest, he sleeps three hours a night, waking to a cup of tea, a ritual followed by a workout on his climbing wall, next to the lab in his home. .
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