It’s a rite of passage for adolescents, and a stubbornly challenging
medical problem. Acne affects millions, but the best treatments for it — antibiotics
that target the bacteria — are losing potency because of
increasing drug resistance.
Now scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggest a
potential new weapon against problem skin: harmless viruses that are already
living in our pores. These viruses, known as phages, naturally kill the
bacterium Propionibacterium acnes, which is the primary culprit of acne.
By boosting the phages’ power, the researchers say acne could be brought under
control. Under normal circumstances, P. acnes lives happily in the pores
of the skin, along with hair follicles and oil glands that produce sebum to
keep the skin and hair from drying out. Acne erupts when the oil glands produce
too much sebum, clogging the pore. Then bacteria build up, and the immune
system decides to react against them, launching an attack that leads to
inflammation and production of the pus-like substance that emerges as a pimple.
Puberty is associated with an explosion in the P. acnes
population, with some teens harboring as much as 100 times more bacteria than
adolescents without acne. Laura Marinelli, a postdoctoral researcher in
dermatology at UCLA, and her colleagues discovered the P. acnes-killing
viruses by analyzing deposits from pore strips collected from volunteers.
Within each pore, the researchers found, were a number of microbial residents,
including P. acnes and its neighbors, such as phages. These are
viruses that cannot replicate on their own, but need to attach themselves to
another cell in order to hijack its reproductive machinery and generate more
copies of itself.
Previous studies had identified certain phages that were associated with
P. acnes, but Marinelli’s group used DNA sequencing techniques to better
understand the genetic blueprint of the microbial universe in the pores and
found a family of 11 phages that were specifically designed to target and kill P.
acnes. These phages attach themselves to P. acnes bacterial cells
and inject their DNA into the bacteria, turning them into phage factories. Once
enough phage progeny are generated, the bacterial cell is destroyed, bursting
open to release the phages. Generally, some P. acnes are already dying
off this way, but because they outnumber the phages, there remains a higher
concentration of pimple-causing microbes in the skin.
But, says Marinelli, “by potentially using phages, we can control
bacteria in people with acne. It there is too much bacteria on the skin, we can
bring their numbers down to healthy levels, so they wouldn’t be aggravating the
immune system.” Ideally, the phages would become part of a cream or topical
treatment that acne-prone people would apply to the skin. Or, if researchers
can isolate the proteins that the phages use to destroy the P. acnes
bacteria, the cream could contain a concentrated form of those compounds.
The proper treatment of acne would still have to leave behind the right
concentration of P. acnes, however. Marinelli says that because the
bacteria also perform healthy functions, such as keeping the skin and body free
of infection from other nasty microbes, any acne treatment shouldn’t eliminate P.
acnes completely. But keeping its numbers in check could save millions of
teens from the pain of pimply skin.
Healthland
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