{"id":107068,"date":"2020-05-14T10:06:53","date_gmt":"2020-05-14T17:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/yc-startup-felix-wants-to-replace-antibiotics-with-programmable-viruses"},"modified":"2020-05-14T10:06:53","modified_gmt":"2020-05-14T17:06:53","slug":"yc-startup-felix-wants-to-replace-antibiotics-with-programmable-viruses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/yc-startup-felix-wants-to-replace-antibiotics-with-programmable-viruses","title":{"rendered":"YC startup Felix wants to replace antibiotics with programmable viruses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/yc-startup-felix-wants-to-replace-antibiotics-with-programmable-viruses2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This could essentially in the wrong hands be very bad but in the positive ways it could cure anything.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Right now the world is at war. But this is no ordinary war. It\u2019s a fight with an organism so small we can only detect it through use of a microscope \u2014 and if we don\u2019t stop it, it could kill millions of us in the next several decades. No, I\u2019m not talking about COVID-19, though that organism is the one on everyone\u2019s mind right now. I\u2019m talking about antibiotic-resistant bacteria.<\/p>\n<p>You see, more than 700,000 people died globally from bacterial infections last year \u2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/drugresistance\/biggest-threats.html\">35,000<\/a> of them in the U.S. If we do nothing, that number could grow to<a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/smart-news\/drug-resistant-infections-could-kill-10-million-annually-2050-180972079\/\"> 10 million<\/a> annually by 2050, according to a United Nations report.<\/p>\n<p>The problem? Antibiotic overuse at the doctor\u2019s office or in livestock and farming practices. We used a lot of drugs over time to kill off all the bad bacteria \u2014 but it only killed off most, not all, of the bad bacteria. And, as the famous line from Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park goes, \u201clife finds a way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This could essentially in the wrong hands be very bad but in the positive ways it could cure anything. Right now the world is at war. But this is no ordinary war. It\u2019s a fight with an organism so small we can only detect it through use of a microscope \u2014 and if we don\u2019t [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107068\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}