Viruses - Phage Therapy

In an earlier blog, I mentioned the discovery of bacteriophages (viruses that kill bacteria) and asked why they weren’t used as treatment/prevention for bacterial diseases? Pranay Lal’s Invisible Empire answers that question.

 

First, says Lal, hierarchy matters. Some top biologists at the time offered alternate explanations – what if, they said, the killer wasn’t a virus but enzymes released by other bacteria? While d’Herelle was outranked, he used bacteriophages to treat a handful of patients suffering from bacterial dysentery. Years later, he cured a few more patients suffering from the bubonic plague. He tried his method in India to treat cholera outbreaks with great success. Sadly, his successes were few and even with the India case, where the effects were on large number of people, the trials had to stop due to the start of the Satyagraha movement (non-cooperation).

 

The few trials conducted after that didn’t help the case for various reasons:

“The small-scale phage trials were poorly documented… and did not hold up to scientific scrutiny… (and unfortunately) there were few studies in the US and the UK… which rose to dominate the global world order, never accorded prominence to the success story of phage therapy.”

It didn’t help that the Soviet bloc called out the success with phage therapy:

“There was growing suspicion in the West of anything Russian and Eastern European…”

 

Plus, there was an alternative that seemed to work wonders. Yes, antibiotics. At the time, antibiotics were thought to be a ‘one size fits all’ solution. In contrast:

“Phages were complex to make and strictly strain-specific. Before good storage practices were developed, the short shelf life of phages and other storage and handling limitations were also seen as inconveniences.”

And lastly, as Lal adds:

“By the 1960’s, we looked unbeatable with our arsenal of antibiotics.”

 

But, with the overuse of antibiotics and the consequent emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria, bacteriophages are being looked at again. Today, they also fit into the idea of “targeted medicine” as opposed to “scattergun broad spectrum antibiotics” since each phage seems to kill only one (or a few) type of bacteria. And as our understanding of the microbiome (the plethora of bacteria that live within us and are critical to our well-being and functioning) has increased, the importance of not killing bacteria within the body indiscriminately is also appreciated better:

“This is why phage therapy is such an important field to explore.”

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