Steffanie Strathdee: Slaying Superbugs and Saving Lives

While on a bucket list trip to Egypt, Steffanie Strathdee’s husband Tom Patterson fell ill with what they first assumed to be food poisoning. They soon discovered it was much more serious.

Tom was diagnosed with pancreatitis and gallstones. The gallstones had blocked his biliary duct, which had caused an abscess the size of a small football to form in his abdomen. When the fluid inside the abscess was cultured, doctors found the “worst bacteria on the planet,” Acinetobacter baumannii. This bacteria, nicknamed Iraqibacter due to the veterans who have returned from the middle east with the superbug, is an organism that is very prone to acquiring antimicrobial resistance genes from other bacteria.

Tom was very ill. With the combination of pancreatitis and the superbug, his chance of survival was no more than 10%. Acinetobacter baumannii was only partially sensitive to three known antibiotics, and those were considered to be last chance therapies. He was treated with those drugs, but his bacteria resisted all of them.

Steffanie is an infectious disease epidemiologist, but felt blindsided by Tom’s diagnosis. Luckily, she had the right combination of knowledge, access to research, and willing medical and research professionals to try alternative therapies.

Her research led her to phage therapy. Bacteriaphage therapy (phage therapy, for short), are viruses that have naturally evolved to attack bacteria. The perfect predator, they have been co-evolving with bacteria for 4 billion years. There are more than 10 million trillion trillion phages on earth and they are everywhere: in water, soil, and our bodies. Phage therapy has been a known treatment against bacteria for decades, but has been practiced more in the former Soviet Union since western countries started relying on penicillin and other antibiotics since the 1940’s. The challenge is to find the particular phage that is effective against the bacterial infection being treated.

You are going to love this story of love, determination, resourcefulness and triumph. Steffanie cured Tom’s illness with the help of three universities, the US Navy and researchers from across the world. What she discovered in the process is a super weapon against multidrug antimicrobial resistant diseases, which are expected to kill more than ten million people per year by 2050.

Links and notes:

Steffanie Strathdee and Robert Schooley are co-directors of the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (“IPATH”) at UC San Diego
Donate to IPATH here
Steffanie Strathdee and Tom Patterson’s book about their ordeal is called The Perfect Predator
Learn more about The Infection Prevention Strategy at www.IC.tips
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About Dr. Strathdee

Dr. Strathdee is an infectious disease epidemiologist renowned for her research on the intersection of HIV and drug use, having generated >600 scholarly publications. She is Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences and Harold Simon Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Diego where she codirects the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics. She is married to Thomas L. Patterson, Professor of Psychiatry at UC San Diego, where they co-direct a research and training program on the Mexico-US border. Strathdee was recently credited with saving her husband’s life from a deadly superbug infection using bacteriophages –viruses that attack bacteria. The case, which involved cooperation from three universities, the U.S. Navy and researchers across the globe, shows how phage therapy is a future weapon against multi-drug resistant bacterial infections which are expected to kill 10 million people per year by 2050. Strathdee and Patterson co-authored a book on their story called The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug. For her efforts to revitalize phage therapy in the West, she was named one of TIME magazine’s Most Influential People in Health Care in 2018.