4 ms·

Hopefully some knowledgeable can chime in. I was under the impression that in the long term antibiotics will need to be replaced by something else. I'm 42 and j

Hopefully some knowledgeable can chime in. I was under the impression that in the long term antibiotics will need to be replaced by something else. I'm 42 and just this year I learned (in a mainstream newspaper) about bacteriophages [1] as a means of combating infections. Does anybody know if we are close to seeing widespread adoption of this approach? Is it too costly? Is there a risk that it may get out of control? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage

dfeojm-zlib 7y ago
The gist as I understand it was that Western medicine bet the farm on antibotics while Russian medicine went primarily towards phages. Because of it's Not Invented Here status, Western medicine was biased against it for ideological and political reasons.
boldlybold 7y ago
Using phages to treat infections (phage therapy) has traditionally been suppressed in the West, but is making a comeback with a few high-profile case studies in recent years. Tom Patterson had an atb resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infection that was cured with phages [1]. His wife wrote a book about it (The Perfect Predator) that is a good read review of the field. More recently, a patient with cystic fibrosis was cured of a Mycobacterium abscessus infection with phage therapy [2]. These therapies are currently very expensive and time consuming, as they require custom testing of libraries of phage against the specific microbial isolate. There have not been any successful large scale clinical trials yet. For a good review of the field (but behind academic paywall), see [3] [1] https://aac.asm.org/content/61/10/e00954-17 https://aac.asm.org/content/61/10/e00954-17 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0437-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0437-z [3] https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(19)30052-6 https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(1...

dfeojm-zlib 7y ago

The gist as I understand it was that Western medicine bet the farm on antibotics while Russian medicine went primarily towards phages. Because of it's Not Invented Here status, Western medicine was biased against it for ideological and political reasons.

boldlybold 7y ago

Using phages to treat infections (phage therapy) has traditionally been suppressed in the West, but is making a comeback with a few high-profile case studies in recent years. Tom Patterson had an atb resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infection that was cured with phages [1]. His wife wrote a book about it (The Perfect Predator) that is a good read review of the field. More recently, a patient with cystic fibrosis was cured of a Mycobacterium abscessus infection with phage therapy [2]. These therapies are currently very expensive and time consuming, as they require custom testing of libraries of phage against the specific microbial isolate. There have not been any successful large scale clinical trials yet. For a good review of the field (but behind academic paywall), see [3] [1] https://aac.asm.org/content/61/10/e00954-17 https://aac.asm.org/content/61/10/e00954-17 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0437-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0437-z [3] https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(19)30052-6 https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(1...