Phage Therapy

Phage therapy is the therapeutic use of lytic bacteriophages to treat pathogenic bacterial infections. Bacteriophages, or "phages" are viruses that invade only bacterial cells and, in the case of lytic phages, cause the bacterium to burst and die, thus releasing more phages. Phage therapy is a potential alternative to antibiotics. After having been extensively used and developed mainly in former Soviet Union countries for about 90 years, some phage therapies are now becoming tested on an experimental basis in other countries such as USA for a variety of bacterial and poly-microbial biofilm infections. Phage therapy has many potential applications in human medicine as well as dentistry, veterinary science and agriculture.

An important theoretical benefit of phage therapy is that bacteriophages can be much more specific than more common drugs, so can be chosen to be harmless to not only the host organism (human, animal or plant), but also other beneficial bacteria, such as gut flora, reducing the chances of opportunistic infections. They also have few if any side effects as opposed to drugs, and do not stress the liver. Because they replicate in vivo, a single, small dose is sometimes sufficient.On the other hand this specificity is also a disadvantage, a phage will only kill a bacterium if it is a match to the specific subspecies; thus phage mixtures are often applied to improve the chances of success, or samples can be taken and an appropriate phage identified and grown.