SUPERBUGS are devising ever more inventive ways to evade antibiotics, so
alternative weapons are badly needed. One mode of attack is to simply turn off
the genes that make them dangerous. You can even turn superbugs into live
vaccines. “You don’t kill them, you just don’t let them cause an infection,”
says Stuart Levy of Tufts University in Boston. “It could revolutionise the
treatment of infectious disease.”
Most disease-causing bacteria have an arsenal of virulence genes, which help
them survive in human tissues. These genes code for things like toxins, but are
only turned on when the bugs invade a…
