> In the end you should end up with some phage solution which specifically attacks the bacteria
This reminds of the universal cure to disease being a bullet [1].
Phages are promising. That doesn’t mean they can’t hurt you [2].
This reminds of the universal cure to disease being a bullet [1].
Phages are promising. That doesn’t mean they can’t hurt you [2].
The biggest hindrance is that the western process of developing and releasing new medicine is ill-suited for phage treatment.
…as evidenced by the booming phage industry somewhere in the east?
(The weird thing is this railing against western medicine or whatnot is usually a dead ringer for pseudoscience. Yet phages are a scientifically valid thereaupeutic route [1].)
How is this different from antibiotics?
Nothing about phages makes them not worth developing. Exhibit A: they’re being researched and developed.
And this makes them “not worth…developing” why?
(The comparison to antibiotics was that the antibiotic-bacteria system is coevolving too. Exhibit A: TFA on antibiotic resistance.)
Again, what are you basing this on?
> This is not cost effective to go through the whole process
Now do personalized medicine.
Personal medicine as in individual combination of existing drugs is easier to achieve in current regulatory framework then using new drugs.
2) Phages are live organisms (as much as you can call a virus "alive"). The shelf life is very very short. A couple of days probably.
1 + 2 => A hospital would have to store thousands of different phages to be able to treat most of it's patients and it would have to replace those stores twice a week.
Couldn’t you create a few compound batches that treat sets of bacteria, balancing distribution cost and side effects?
Do that a little, remove phages that don’t work better than antibiotics, tailor for local conditions and I doubt you’re adding more than a few dozen medicines to the hospital’s inventory.
> shelf life is very very short. A couple of days probably
Plenty can survive cryogenic suspension [1].
The whole procedure of selecting a phage personalized for the patient and then growing it into a treatment is so slow the patient may die before it's ready. Works for chonic infections but not much else.
There are probably phage treatments that are not personalized: test susceptibility and then mail-order the treatment. That treatment:
- Would be very expensive to *produce* compared to most antibiotics. I emphasize *produce* because the price of antibiotics rarely reflect how much it costs to produce them. Compared to antibiotics, phage treatments have very low margins.
- Would work for a very limited percentage of patients (probably less than 10%). There are hundreds of phages for each bacteria species (yes, they're species-specific and sub-species-specific).
- Have a very *very* short shelf life, possibly a couple of days. So, no pharmacy or hospital can keep a sufficiently diverse supply of phages in store to treat most patients, possibly not even whole countries.