4 ms·
Antibiotics are extremely expensive to develop (on the order of billions of dollars), and patients regularly die because 1) the antibiotics were ineffective aga
by smallnamespace 10y ago
Antibiotics are extremely expensive to develop (on the order of billions of dollars), and patients regularly die because 1) the antibiotics were ineffective against the particular bacteria in their body or 2) the antibiotics wiped out their normal flora, and give them intractable cases of C. difficile and the like.
> zero other options
Those patients literally had zero other options than just dying.
Phages should be another weapon in our arsenal. You're right that they might not end up working out, but right now there is chronic underinvestment in research to find out whether work, because nobody is going to heavily fund research for therapies that will never pass the regulatory hurdle. It seems like bad risk management to back ourselves into a corner -- the whole point of research is to find out whether other things work. Defense in depth isn't just for software security.
- Retric 10y agoThe problem is they are not free. If we trade 1 new Antibiotic and get X Phage treatments how large an X do you need to break even? Next is it cheaper to find the next Antibiotic or get those X Phage treatments adopted? Current estimates suggest Antibiotics are still a vastly better investment. I mean we have plenty of ridiculously expensive treatments out there already. It's not clear creating such things are a good investment vs. reducing traffic fatalities etc.
- smallnamespace 10y agoWell, the only way to answer that question is to do some more research on phages, and I guarantee you, the funding for antibiotics research is more than 100x that for phage therapies, in large part because of regulation. Phage therapies are actually used regularly in Georgia, Russia, and other parts of the former Soviet Union, in part because they couldn't get access to antibiotics during WW2 and right afterwards. You can do the math as to whether we've passed the point of diminishing marginal returns on antibiotics.
- Retric 10y agoLook for actual numbers, the USSR for example did quite a bit of Phage research and then gave it up. So, no it's not 100x in favor of Antibiotics, which get vastly less funding than you might think.
- smallnamespace 10y agoThey didn't give it up, it's still practiced today: "Phage therapy is used in Russia, Georgia and Poland" [1]. Also [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy [2] https://www.phagetherapycenter.com/pii/PatientServlet?command=static_home https://www.phagetherapycenter.com/pii/PatientServlet?comman...
- Retric 10y agoAs a treatment of last resort sure, as an area of active research it took a massive hit at the time due to poor results relative to antibiotics.
- coryrc 10y agoYes, before computers and labs-on-chips, growing them is difficult and time-consuming and maybe even dangerous, making them worse than antibiotics of the time. But now with MRSA spreading everywhere and chips that could measure purity, we should be able to make them cheaper and safer with fewer side effects.
- notadoc 10y agoFYI, C. diff is treatable with fecal transplantation with a 92% cure rate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3365524/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3365524/ A few facilities in the USA are currently treating with fecal transplants, like John Hopkins. http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/gastroenterology_hepatology/clinical_services/advanced_endoscopy/fecal_transplantation.html http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/gastroenterology_hepatology/c...