4 ms·

Really fascinating area of science. They were ignored in lieu of antibiotics in the post war forming of big Pharma (except for pockets like France and Russia).

• Raydovsky 4y ago
  You forgot Georgia. They are way ahead of Russia when it comes to phages
• ch4s3 4y ago
  We’ll phages present their own issues. Antibiotics were cheap and easy to mass produce.
  • manmal 4y ago
    Are you talking about bacteriophages? What issues do they present?
    • CatWChainsaw 4y ago
      I'm guessing that once the research into a particular phage reaches a level equivalent to research in a particular antibiotic, the cost to manufacture that phage might be higher. In order to mass-produce phage you need a population of vulnerable bacteria kept alive long enough and in high enough number to keep your phage replicating since they rely on cellular machinery, and that takes large bioreactors. And that's if you're lucky. Some bacteria replicate under extremely obnoxious conditions, and sometimes the phages will only generate double-digit levels of virion particles each generation as opposed to the triple-digit target you want, and all your attempts to optimize the system hit a brick wall. Ask me how I know? :)
      • manmal 4y ago
        The phages we are interested in here would be grown against human intestinal pathogens, and human gut conditions are not that hard to simulate, right? They are not volcanic thermophilics. A patient’s fecal sample could be grown in an incubator, and the phages on file could be tested on it. Surely this can be automated.
        • deleted 4y ago
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        • CatWChainsaw 4y ago
          Your specific example is a rather tame case. Ideally, you would need to incubate the sample in multiple batches to catch the bacteria in the sample that may not grow at a certain percentage of atmospheric oxygen. Testing an entire phage library against it can be automated and I've seen it done, but the machinery to do so is still what qualifies as a big investment for the companies I know of that work on this. But if the library fails, and you need to find and mass-produce a new phage, the pipeline starts over again. That is what I was referring to in my previous comment. I have worked with certain gut bacteria that can be infected by phages, but those phages replicate in the tenfold range rather than the hundredfold range you see with bacteriophages like for E. coli. Growing such bacteria at bioreactor scale is challenging enough before you add in a phage that, by its nature, does not replicate at the scale you need. And post-reaction, filtering out the phage into something safe like saline can lead to more loss of phage, which I have also seen happen.
    • adrianN 4y ago
      They are viruses, so they reproduce and mutate. Quality control is difficult. They're also rather specific in what bacteria they infect, so you usually first need to isolate the bacteria and culture them to figure out which phages like them.
• acjohnson55 4y ago
  My understanding is that phage therapy has some promise, but that its successes are overstated and challenges understated by folks who may think they're an easy alternative to antibiotics.