History of Phage Therapy

Following the discovery of bacteriophages by Frederick Twort and Felix d'Hérelle in 1915 and 1917, phage therapy was immediately recognized by many to be a key way forward for the eradication of bacterial infections. A Georgian, George Eliava, was making similar discoveries. He travelled to the Pasteur Institute in Paris where he met d'Hérelle, and in 1926 he founded the Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia devoted to the development of phage therapy.
In neighbouring countries including Russia, extensive research and development soon began in this field. In the USA during the 1940s, commercialization of phage therapy was undertaken by the large pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly.
Whilst knowledge was being accumulated regarding the biology of phages and how to use phage cocktails correctly, early uses of phage therapy were often unreliable. When antibiotics were discovered in 1941 and marketed widely in the USA and Europe, Western scientists mostly lost interest in further use and study of phage therapy for some time.

Isolated from Western advances in antibiotic production in the 1940s, Russian scientists continued to develop already successful phage therapy to treat the wounds of soldiers in field hospitals. During World War II, the Soviet Union used bacteriophages to treat many soldiers infected with various bacterial diseases e.g. dysentery and gangrene. The success rate was as good as, if not better than any antibiotic.Russian researchers continued to develop and to refine their treatments and to publish their research and results. However, due to the scientific barriers of the Cold War, this knowledge was not translated and did not proliferate across the world.