"This is strange, not least because mainstream scientists have long dismissed phage therapy as a fringe idea pushed by eccentrics who enjoy fishing in sewage (where many phages live). But over the past 15 years, as more and more bacteria have evolved ways to evade our antibiotic arsenal, Navy scientists have turned to phages as a last line of defense. A run-of-the-mill freezer in the Maryland lab holds what’s one of the world’s largest phage libraries: more than 300 viruses, collected on ship-based laboratories all over the world. None of the phages had ever been tested in an infected person — until Tom...
Phage therapy blossomed in Eastern Europe after World War II, largely because researchers there were blocked from developing the mass-produced antibiotics sweeping the West...
Schooley sent a sample of the mutated bacteria back to the Navy. Hamilton’s team screened their phage library again, and sent back a new, tailor-made cocktail to attack the new phase of Tom’s infection.
It all happened within a few days, which Hamilton sees as one of phage therapy’s many advantages over traditional pharmaceuticals. “There’s absolutely no comparison,” Hamilton said. “It could be years to develop a new drug.”"...
Money, too, stands in the way of bringing phage therapy to the masses. Because phages, like antibiotics, are only taken for short periods of time and will never be blockbusters like Viagra or Lipitor, few pharmaceutical companies would make the investment to bring them to market. And, since phages can be found in nature, patenting would also be difficult. “If a company invests money in phages, there’s nothing to keep somebody from isolating another phage that’s close to it and doing the same thing,” Young said. “That’s a problem.”
The barriers mean that phage therapy is almost certainly not going to be the solution to the growing antibiotics crisis. But with no new antibiotics in the pipeline, this unusual treatment is one of the only things that might actually help. “I doubt that we’re going to turn away from antibiotics any time in the near future,” David Weiss, director of the Antibiotic Resistance Center at Emory University School of Medicine, told BuzzFeed News. But, he added, “traditional antibiotic therapy and phages might in theory be used together.”"
This makes a lot of sense. If antibiotics were not so effective for all of the 20th century, I'm sure that this would have been the dominant technology.
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