I was amazed when first learned about "the good guy bacteria", phages, in high school. But, so far, I have only heard about bacteriophage therapy being used today in some treatment centers in the Czech Republic and few other countries, mostly in Eastern Europe.
Phage therapy might sound new, but it has been used since the early 1900s. Phage therapy is the application of bacteria-specific viruses (phages) to combat uncontrolled and undesired bacteria such as those associated with infectious disease. Research on phages have proven phage therapy as compelling alternatives to chemical antibiotics in the fight against bacterial infections.
Obviously, pharmaceutical companies will have a bias against the widely adoption of bacteriophage therapy. So, apart from the obvious, why hasn't this low-cost, inherently non-toxic treatment caught on? Is it a question about corporate greed, safety, lack of research or about possible unknown unknowns?
As you have pointed out, they are in limited use in a number of places. But I think there are two reasons why they aren't used more prevalently. First is that there is really limited profit potential for anybody selling them. I don't think you can get a patent on them so no real way to protect your commercial rights as a company.
But I think the second and more important reason is that phage therapy is highly specific. There is no broad spectrum phage. When a doctor is treating many simple infections (GI, ear infection, sinus infection) they can guess the general category of bug causing it but usually they don't bother to really type the precise organisms you have. Broad spectrum antibiotics will generally work against most of these so they can prescribe something and be confident it will work without having to do further analysis and maybe delay treatment by a day or two.
Whereas phage are highly specific so you have to know precisely what you have. Even among E. coli for examples, you don't have many phages that can kill every strain of E. coli. So phage therapy is viable when you know precisely the strain causing the disease and you have a phage against that exact strain.
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