The value of information gathering in phage–bacteria warfare
academic.oup.com
academic.oup.com
That's it. Better understanding of what is going on inside is always going to help humans.
Phages already proven to work well together with antibiotics, but I guess this paper gets us closer to using phages instead of antibiotics.
Basically, antibiotics are awesome, but suffer from a major problem: Bacteria are very good at evolving resistance to them, so we are running a constant race against mother nature, and we are, to be frank, losing.
Phage are viruses that "prey" on bacteria. If we can harness them to treat infections, they can co-evolve with the bacteria, theoretically solving the resistance problem, and giving us a second means of fighting bacterial infections.
There are however some practical hurdles.
You’d also need to have a fat library of phages sitting in reserve. So that’s a logistics issue. It’s also a bit unclear how they would work with systemic infections - it’s going to be antigenic injected into the bloodstream, most of my understanding of them is for topical applications which parallels the old eastern bloc experience - that’s still incredibly useful
1) Phage are highly specific - there's really no such thing as a "broad spectrum phage", which means you need fairly intensive diagnostic laboratories + an extensive library of phage.
2) There's some regulatory hurdles - these are less than they once were, and the fecal transplant stuff for C. diff, and the treatments that have come from that, have done a lot of how do we think about regulating a living biological treatment.
3) Phage has mostly been used for wounds and other infections where it's relatively easy to get them "on site". For something like sepsis, which is systemic, or some other infections, it's not clear how to get them where they need to go in the concentration they're needed.
The solution that most immediately presents itself, which is just "A lot of phage delivered IV, and then hope they multiply when they reach the right sites" involves being able to grow up a lot of phage, which is a non-trivial problem for a lab. There's purification steps that need to happen, you have to have good enough cultures of the infecting organism to grow the phage, etc.
It's a very, very cool technology, but it's also something that's been "on the cusp" since I was an undergrad, and I'm a tenured faculty member now.