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by yarg
1273 days ago
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Phage therapy seems like it's gonna become increasingly important (we've been using static munitions against increasingly dynamic enemies for far too long). Keyhole and robotic surgeries (already advancing rapidly) are going to be significant and useful. We also need to investigate, understand and classify symbiotic organisms with the same zeal with which we've approached pathogens. We've spent so long glaring at the invisible enemy that we've completely ignored the invisible allies (who we regularly nuke with broad spectrum soaps, gels and other microbicides). All we're really doing is creating monopolies for pathogens. Maybe it's me, but a lot of these article seem to advocate for magical solutions; when there's both enhancements to current technologies and unexploited low-hanging fruit that they aren't even bothering to consider. |
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Phage comes up a lot here - it seems to be on of HN's favorite biology topics. I have a deep and abiding fondness for phage, but they're not quite as awesome as they seem at first glance. From the perspective of an infectious disease epidemiologist who has been super-interested in phage for my whole career (literally tried to get a job out of undergrad with a phage therapeutics startup):
1) There's no such thing as a "broad spectrum" phage. They're organism specific, and that means not only would you need to keep a phage library on hand, but you'd have to do a lot of diagnostic tests. That's going to be both expensive and tricky. There are treatment guidelines for things like sepsis right now that are basically un-doable with phage therapy because of the time it takes to tune a phage library.
2) Phages are living things. Not only is that a weird regulatory framework to be in for a drug, but it also means that you need to be able to keep phage alive. In contrast, antibiotics are inert.
3) Phage therapy is also relatively new in the West (after being abandoned for some very real, very serious safety concerns back in the day), which means there's just less of a R&D infrastructure behind it.
There have been people working on commercializing phage therapy since I was in undergrad (I'm now a tenured professor). The problem is it's hard, and antibiotics are so much better as a treatment that there's kind of a ceiling on the excitement that they can generate, especially when trying to treat at scale.
Some of the most interesting applications are currently combination antibiotic and phage therapy - it's much harder for bacteria to maintain resistance mechanisms for both simultaneously.