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Comment by coryrc | Hacker News Reader

There already is a free and better solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy

Sorry for the redundant comments, but it's important for people to hear this. More people die from MRSA than AIDS in the US, and the FDA is structurally against adaptive therapies.

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As much as I love phage therapy, there are some very real problems with it.

And characterizing it as "free" is...flawed, at best.

The parent comment mentioned "licensing", so I used free as in libre, not beer.

Even then, generalized, FDA-approved "Phage Kits" that don't require bespoke lab solutions for each and every patient likely won't be free as in libre.

Requiring there not be bespoke lab solutions for any patient is the problem -- it's why people are suffering and dying from MRSA now in the USA, but some can travel to poor areas of the former USSR and get cured. We can already take bacterial cultures and breed them in an automated fashion, breeding effective bacteriophages is the next step. We need to be funding R&D into doing this safely and in an automated way. It's already possible to do with 1930s technology so we should only be able to do better now.

It's a scientific and medical requirement, not a regulatory one. Using that on a mass scale, rather than for occasional one-off treatments for particularly unresponsive infections, is going to require kits, or a massive investment in laboratory capacity in the U.S.

This is the field I work in. Phage therapy is awesome, and actively being explored, but there is a reason antibiotics won out. Phages are anything but easy and general-purpose.

Wikipedia has "In the West, no therapies are currently authorized for use on humans, although phages for killing food poisoning bacteria (Listeria) are now in use"

which sounds like a regulatory issue. And a bit of an unnecessary one it seems as the treatments seem harmless to humans.

It's a regulatory issue, but it's also a clinical one. Even if it gets approved, it will still need a general purpose kit-based form, and that's a massive clinical and scientific hurdle.

Also, phage therapy killed people in the past. Mostly due to poor purification, but it's not inherently harmless.

So has orange juice.

> a massive investment in laboratory capacity in the U.S.

Can you please explain how a full treatment course worth of Staphylococcus Aureus bacteriophage will only set you back about $100 in Moscow, Russia?

There is a difference between treating particularly unresponsive cases of S. aureus with phage therapy and it becoming the frontline standard of care for all bacterial diseases.

Additionally, Russia has done the investment in laboratory capacity in order to do phage therapy. Introducing it into the United States would require new equipment, space and staffing in order to facilitate more widespread culturing (as there are no "broad spectrum" phages), as well as the actual preparation of phage-based therapeutics.

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