Bacteriophage therapy is the use of “good” viruses (bacterial viruses) to treat antibiotic resistant or chronic bacterial infections. The bacterial virus acts directly and exclusively on the target bacteria to destroy it through a process called “lysis.”
Phage therapy is a viable alternative treatment for infection. It is an especially useful tool for chronic and antibiotic resistant infections.
Bacteria like MRSA, ESBL and CRE and VRE are superbugs that have become the scary reality of today’s world.
Phage can target multiple antibiotic resistant infections and also prove advantageous in treating infections that can’t be effectively treated with antibiotics due to poor blood circulation or bacterial biofilms, because of their ability to translocate within wounds and in the body. They are a helpful solution for the treatment of infections in people with allergies to antibiotics, as well as help protect the bacterial ecology (due to phage specificity) in the gut.
As phage is a naturally occurring organism, it has the ability to adapt and modify to changing antibiotic resistance, being bacteria’s natural predator, there are great opportunities to discover “new” bacteriophage against those bacteria.
The G. Eliava Institute of Bacteriophage, Microbiology and Virology in Tbilisi, Georgia is one of the world leaders in phage therapy research and has an unprecedented collection of bacteriophages that can be utilized for developing custom phage preparations.