Phage Therapy - Potential Benefits

Potential Benefits

Bacteriophage treatment offers a possible alternative to conventional antibiotic treatments for bacterial infection. It is conceivable that, although bacteria can develop resistance to phage, the resistance might be easier to overcome than resistance to antibiotics. Just as bacteria can evolve resistance, viruses can evolve to overcome resistance; however, the ability to evolve raises serious safety questions.

Bacteriophages are very specific, targeting only one or a few strains of bacteria. Traditional antibiotics have more wide-ranging effect, killing both harmful bacteria and useful bacteria such as those facilitating food digestion. The specificity of bacteriophages might reduce the chance that useful bacteria are killed when fighting an infection.

Some evidence shows the ability of phages to travel to a required site—including the brain, where the blood brain barrier can be crossed—and multiply in the presence of an appropriate bacterial host, to combat infections such as meningitis. However the patient's immune system can, in some cases, mount an immune response to the phage (2 out of 44 patients in a Polish trial).

A few research groups in the West are engineering a broader spectrum phage, and also a variety of forms of MRSA treatments, including impregnated wound dressings, preventative treatment for burn victims, phage-impregnated sutures. Enzybiotics are a new development at Rockefeller University that create enzymes from phage. These show potential for preventing secondary bacterial infections, e.g. pneumonia developing in patients suffering from flu and otitis. Purified recombinant phage enzymes can be used as separate antibacterial agents in their own right.

There are no non-toxic antibiotics to treat some bacteria such as multiple-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, but killing of the bacteria via intraperitoneal, intravenous, or intranasal route of phages in vivo has been shown to work in laboratory tests.