It's a poor fit for the current economic/political model of drug development, licensing, and commercialization. It isn't legal to sell a treatment for any dise

It's a poor fit for the current economic/political model of drug development, licensing, and commercialization. It isn't legal to sell a treatment for any disease or condition unless you've conducted multiple rounds of clinical trials proving that it is both safe and effective. Running these trials is fantastically expensive, especially when you don't know ahead of time which treatments will make it out the other side to become sellable products. Pharma companies are good at getting things through these trial stages. But they can't afford to do it unless there's a patent-protected profit on the other side for the ones that work. Thus the problem is that phages are essentially a virus picked up out of some pond muck or something. You can't really mass-produce them, and it wouldn't make sense to anyways, as the application for any one phage is very limited. You can't run a particular phage though a set of clinical trials - the effectiveness of a particular strain would be gone long before you got through the first phase. Making enough profit from selling it after commercialization once it made it through the clinical trials that it can't possibly ever pass is a completely absurd notion. What we need to make phages more widely used isn't economic investment but a complete redo of how we legally require the healthcare industry to operate.