Illustration : The T Even phage has inspired creators A tribute

When a patient is infected by a superbug, phages can be used to kill the superbug.

Each type of bacterium has a killer-phages arround.

Phages are useful for limiting the proliferation of bacterias – good or bad ones.

A selection of phrases from the WikiPedia article

“Phages are very selective in the strains of bacteria they are effective against.”

“Phages tend to be more successful than antibiotics where there is a biofilm covered by a polysaccharide layer, which antibiotics typically cannot penetrate.”

“Phages are typically harmless not only to the host organism but also to other beneficial bacteria, such as the gut microbiota, reducing the chances of opportunistic infections.”

“… phage therapy would be expected to give rise to few side effects, even at higher-than-therapeutic levels.”

“There is also a phage therapy unit in Wrocław, Poland, established in 2005, which continues several decades long research of the Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the only such centre in a European Union country.”

“In the United States, Washington and Oregon law allows naturopathic physicians to use any therapy that is legal any place in the world on an experimental basis …”

“Steffanie A. Strathdee‘s 2019 book The Perfect Predator: An Epidemiologist’s Journey to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug, co-written with her husband Thomas Patterson, was published by Hachette Book Group in 2019. It describes Dr Strathdee’s ultimately successful attempt to introduce phage therapy as a life-saving treatment for her husband, critically ill with a completely antibiotic-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infection following severe pancreatitis.”

This selection shows that it is absolutely incomprehensible that phage therapy is not widely used in the world as Superbugs kill more and more.

Factories for phages

But most Superbugs are specific to a patient and corresponding phages cannot be produced beforehand.

Source

WikiPedia article about phage therapy.