6 ms·
Bacteriophages were used instead of antibiotics in the Soviet Union, and are still used today in Georgia.
by DonaldFisk 8y ago
Bacteriophages were used instead of antibiotics in the Soviet Union, and are still used today in Georgia.
- smaddox 8y agoMy extremely limited understanding is that a given bacteriophage only attacks a very specific strain, and thus that you would need to constantly evolve them to fight new strains. While perhaps not useless, that doesn't sound like a replacement for antibiotics.
- ManFromUranus 8y agoWell not an easy replacement anyway, but something that is always useful forever.
- DonaldFisk 8y agoIn the Soviet Union, they used cocktails of bacteriophage in much the same way as broad-spectrum antibiotics are used, whenever it was impractical to identify the bacterial strain. Bacteriophage evolve of their own accord, so phage resistance is temporary. Often the bacteriophage strain you need already exists and you just have to find it. This is much less effort than developing a new antibiotic.
- AstralStorm 8y agoThe general problem is that bacteria co-evolve with phages making outdated stains as worthless as last year's flu vaccine most of the time.
- JulianMorrison 8y agoPossibly with CRISPR patching of their innards, you can tailor-and-deploy them automatically?
- aaronblohowiak 8y agoThe other parts of the process are still quite onerous
- JulianMorrison 8y agoAlso bear in mind that as far as new strains in one patient go, unlike antibiotics they will evolve themselves to chase the new strain down, and that's useful.
- AstralStorm 8y agoAnd sometimes not. Please provide serious efficacy numbers compared to antibiotics.
- balls187 8y agoGiven how medicine works in the US, that's not a problem, but an opportunity. US Medicine is for profit, and the money is in reoccuring treatment, not cures. So a never ending battle of cat-and-mouse is the type of R&D phramas would love. A potential future scenario: Keep going to your doctor to get a Rx for the latest strain or pay a monthly fee to a Bacteriophage-As-A-Service SV tech company to get the latest delivered right to your door you use in conjunction with a smartphone app. The latter of which would have operated illegally until sufficiently large enough to hire insider DC lobbyists to gut the FDA.
- DonaldFisk 8y agoAnd yet phage therapy's been successfully used under communism but not capitalism. This is because it's cheap, low tech, and there are no economic barriers to market entry.
- AstralStorm 8y agoYou forgot to mention the scale. It does not easily scale as the required laboratory space to handle even a few hundred phage strains is enormous. Please provide numbers of patients treated with phages, time to treat one and efficacy numbers.
- sdabdoub 8y agoYou are correct, however with new sequencing technologies like the MinION[1] we have access to real-time sequencing in something roughly the size of a cell phone. They are still in development and there are some technical hurdles, but before too long cheap, fast, and accurate strain typing should be ubiquitous. The next issue is then creating the specific phages, but the first stage is pretty close at hand. [1] https://nanoporetech.com/products/minion https://nanoporetech.com/products/minion
- AstralStorm 8y agoAnd the final issue will be actually getting this in the field for non laboratory personnel. Where a GP can fashion a phage in their office and/or order one as easily as the right antibiotic. Good luck trying to even get the bacterial sample to do it for quite a few kinds of infections. Lungs and other organs would need a good biopsy or at least really well done aspiration, handling of samples is very messy. It is a good method to use in hospital settings perhaps where you want to sample anyway.