Dr. Glen D’Souza

So I think it's happening everywhere.

We see these systems in wastewater treatment plants, for instance.

We see that in agricultural context in the ocean.

It's funny, we found a lot of signatures of warfare, microbial warfare, about 6,000 feet on the ocean floor, right?

And it makes more sense there, right?

Because the nutrients there are extremely, extremely difficult to get.

Oxygen is a problem.

So yeah, so it's everywhere, except it might be at different levels in different places.

Yeah, I mean, definitely we can, right?

So one of these systems, as I keep on saying, is a spear gun, right?

What the spear gun does is delivers toxins into another cell.

But we can, you know, essentially these are assassins.

What if you train an assassin or what if you train a hitman to find or remove things you don't like, right?

For instance, historically, we've used antibiotics to get rid of undesirable bugs from our systems, except antibiotics are indiscriminate.

They might just kill everyone.

They might kill the good ones, right?

We know that these killing bacteria are extremely specific in who they like to target or what kind of bugs they like to target, at least in many cases.

What if we can learn more of this system and then engineer living antibiotics?

Essentially, you can load any drug on these killing systems and then...

create an assassin cell that you introduce in your microbiome and say, okay, go and find the undesirable one and displace it off, right?