NEW DELHI—Pranav Johri completed five rounds of antibiotics to treat a persistent prostate problem in his early 30s, but his case flummoxed doctors because the medicine seemed to make him worse.
“My entire life had become so limited,” says the 35-year-old workaholic from India’s capital city, recalling how he couldn’t summon strength for much more than a small meal in between long naps.
The athletic man Apurva Virmani Johri had married just a few years prior was confined to their bedroom, surrounded by photos of the couple hiking around the world — a constant reminder of their former life.
“I think the hardest part was just not seeing him smile,” she says. “This is a person who would smile at the drop of a hat.”
Pranav’s breaking point came when his doctor told him to prepare for a lifetime of symptom management, rather than a cure for his prostatitis, a swelling of the walnut-sized gland below a man’s bladder.
The frustrated patient scoured the internet for answers to his mysterious predicament. He contacted a specialist to conduct more in-depth testing and learned the bacteria causing his prostatitis was resistant to all five antibiotics he’d taken.
He stumbled upon stories of others in similar circumstances who turned to a long-retired cure for their illnesses: phage therapy.
Desperate, Pranav travelled to an Eastern European institute specializing in the treatment, which involves a cocktail of natural bacteria eaters. He paid thousands of dollars for the last ditch-effort to rid his body of the infection.
Western doctors mostly shelved phage therapy as a treatment after the advent of antibiotics.
But the drugs, once considered a medical marvel, no longer work against a growing number of bacterial infections. Rampant misuse and overuse helped spur the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, resulting in superbugs that now kill an estimated 1.5 million people each year.
While superbugs proliferate, antibiotic discovery has stalled. For pharmaceutical companies, there is little profit incentive to invest in drugs that quickly cure patients; medicine for chronic conditions presents a more tempting return on investment.
That leaves patients like Pranav, whose infections don’t respond to antibiotics and whose doctors run out of new medicines to prescribe, turning to the century-old practice.
However, experts warn phage therapy is an unlikely magic bullet: the treatment is not widely available, backed mostly by anecdotal evidence, and requires bespoke solutions for most patients.
Some medical experts instead hang their hope on lengthening the lifespan of existing drugs. Catching infections sooner and treating patients properly could help slow down resistance. But, like antibiotic discovery, diagnostics research lacks the necessary funding for big advances.
Without more investment and progress in drug discovery and diagnostics, experts fear the world will enter a post-antibiotic era, in which millions are expected to die each year from infections once easily treated.
“It’s not a problem for the future. It’s a problem that exists right now,” says Bob Hancock, a microbiology professor at the University of British Columbia whose lab focuses on designing new therapies for infections.
“It’s kind of the global climate change of health.”
PHAGElogist 