Benefit of Phage Therapy

A clear benefit of phage therapy is that it does not have the potentially very severe adverse effects of antibiotics. Also it can be fast-acting, once the exact bacteria are identified and the phages administered. Another benefit of phage therapy is that although bacteria are able to develop resistance to phages the resistance is much easier to overcome. The reason behind this is that phages replicate and undergo natural selection and have probably been infecting bacteria since the beginning of life on this planet. Although bacteria evolve at a fast rate, so too will phages. Being smaller, they can mutate faster. Bacteria are most likely to modify the molecule that the phage targets, such as a cell surface glycoprotein, which is usually a bacterial receptor. In response to this modification, phages will evolve in such a way that counteracts this change, thus allowing them to continue targeting bacteria and causing cell lysis. As a consequence phage therapy is devoid of problems similar to antibiotic resistance.
Bacteriophages are often very specific, targeting only one or a few strains of bacteria. Traditional antibiotics usually have more wide-ranging effect, killing both harmful bacteria and useful bacteria such as those facilitating food digestion. The specificity of bacteriophages reduces the chance that useful bacteria are killed when fighting an infection.