3 ms·

As the author of the op-ed you are referring to, allow me to chime in. It's true that a huge effort went into saving my husband's life with phage therapy but a

As the author of the op-ed you are referring to, allow me to chime in. It's true that a huge effort went into saving my husband's life with phage therapy but as a result of that, it's getting easier to treat other cases. I'll comment on your other points too: 1) Broad spectrum phages don't exist in nature but gene-editing techniques can be applied and this technology now exists. Several biotechs are now working in this space. 2) Phages are not hard to keep 'alive'. They need to be refrigerated and kept away from sunlight. 3) True that phage therapy is relatively new in the West but the field is exploding. There are very few pharmas still developing antibiotics and very few in the pipeline, esp for gram-negatives, so there is an imperative to have alternatives to antibiotics. With an ever-expanding phage library of well characterized phages, it is possible to generate personalized phage cocktails in days. An antibiotic takes a decade to develop, at around a billion $, and has collateral damage on the microbiome. For more on the story, check out ThePerfectPredator.com

Fomite 7y ago
For the record, your talk at IDWeek last year was one of the highlights of the conference. To touch on a few of your points: 1) I'm hopeful about these, and have been sort of idly following them, but I think they're a long way from anywhere close to the utility the average HackerNews reader is hoping to get out of them. 2) When compared to "There's an inert, shelf-and-temperature stable blister pack of these living at the bottom of a bag" they're hard to keep alive. While not relevant in your husband's case, the vast burden of AMR is going to end up falling on the global poor, and in those cases, solutions that require a cold chain aren't reliable solutions. 3) It is exploding, but I've been following phage research for 15 years now, and it's one of those technologies that has lived in the "any day now" space that whole time. So I tend to try to temper the expectation of folks because I fear that it's going to end up, at best, as a supplemental solution to a very complex problem, rather than the "a new technology will get us out of this" path the popular media sometimes portrays it as.

Fomite 7y ago

For the record, your talk at IDWeek last year was one of the highlights of the conference. To touch on a few of your points: 1) I'm hopeful about these, and have been sort of idly following them, but I think they're a long way from anywhere close to the utility the average HackerNews reader is hoping to get out of them. 2) When compared to "There's an inert, shelf-and-temperature stable blister pack of these living at the bottom of a bag" they're hard to keep alive. While not relevant in your husband's case, the vast burden of AMR is going to end up falling on the global poor, and in those cases, solutions that require a cold chain aren't reliable solutions. 3) It is exploding, but I've been following phage research for 15 years now, and it's one of those technologies that has lived in the "any day now" space that whole time. So I tend to try to temper the expectation of folks because I fear that it's going to end up, at best, as a supplemental solution to a very complex problem, rather than the "a new technology will get us out of this" path the popular media sometimes portrays it as.