4 ms·
It's not a matter of NIH syndrome. There's very real obstacles to phage therapy. The west was using phage therapy...until it started killing people (bad phage
by Fomite 7y ago
It's not a matter of NIH syndrome.
There's very real obstacles to phage therapy. The west was using phage therapy...until it started killing people (bad phage preps are dangerous). Penicillin came along, and you have something that's just outright better.
Antibiotics are by and large less dangerous, more stable, broader spectrum, etc. It's also a difficult challenge from the regulatory perspective - as with fecal transplant, "bespoke set of microbes" is...weird...from a legal perspective. The reasons the USSR was leading phage research was they were behind on antibiotics.
We've come back around because we need a backstop against antibiotics failing.
- m0zg 7y agoPenicillin came along in late 19th century though. Well before anyone even knew what a "phage" was.
- Fomite 7y agoFlemming's work was in 1928, over a decade after folks were using phage therapy, and the mass production of penicillin was in the mid-40's. Note that we were using phage therapy before we knew what phages were, because as it turns out, that's not really necessary. Except that if you don't know what they are, you also don't know that your preparation is full of endotoxins from ruptured bacteria, which are a threat to your patient. Which is one of the reasons it wasn't terribly popular.