In 2010, when Lilli Holst scraped a lump of soil from the underside of a rotting eggplant, she had no idea that this act would help to save the life of a British teenager, eight years later and 6,000 miles away.
AbstractThe emergence of multiple drug-resistant bacteria has prompted interest in alternatives to conventional antimicrobials. One of the possible replacement options for antibiotics is the use of bacteriophages as antimicrobial agents. Phage therapy is an important alternative to antibiotics in the current era of drug-resistant pathogens. Bacteriophages have played an important role in the expansion of molecular biology and have been used as antibacterial agents since 1966. In this review, we describe a brief history of bacteriophages and clinical studies on their use in bacterial disease prophylaxis and therapy. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of bacteriophages as therapeutic agents in this regard.
This year millions of people around the world have radically changed their way of life to avoid contact with other people and, thus, the novel coronavirus. Despite social distancing, many have still gotten sick in part from other viral infections. That is because, as scientists are increasingly learning, many viruses are lurking quietly in the human body, hidden away in cells in the lungs, blood and nerves and inside the multitudes of microbes that colonize our gut.
At the same time that the antibiotic era is running into serious problems because of antibiotic resistance, we may be at the dawn of the era of phage therapy for bacterial infections. But phage therapy is actually over a century old, so what we are seeing is the rebirth of phage therapy with far more advanced technology for biologics in general, and genetic manipulation specifically. Further, the combination of antibiotic and phage therapy may be particularly potent.But the history of phage therapy also tells us that we cannot get so caught up in the hype that we skip over careful and rigorous clinical research.
What is interesting about bacteriophages and other viruses in the gut is that every person has their own unique set, with almost no overlap between two different people.
