Phage therapy is a blind spot for Western medicine. It's a new category of drug, which means lots of work to get it through FDA or UK trials, and it's not a single molecule - it's a process. There's little point to taking a single combination of phages, packing them into a pill and ramming it through the clinical trials process - it'll be way too specific to be worth it.

Instead, the entire pipeline - keeping a library of bacteriophages, testing them for efficacy against samples, modifying them for increased virulence, screening for safety - needs to be approved, and run for each patient.

That's too experimental for the FDA, and the FDA is too rigid to allow approval for such pipelines (except in rare cases, like CAR-T immunotherapy.) Plus the UK has that anti-gene therapy law because of a disastrous adenovirus trial that killed six healthy volunteers.

The West is too risk-averse and conservative to make the big bureaucratic changes to allow this. Russia had no such hangups, which is why phage therapy flourished there.