Bacteriophage therapy: are we running before we have learned to walk?

European Journal of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (2023)

Yet despite the paucity of research, the fervor for new antimicrobials has led many pharmaceutical companies to formulate new clinical trials to evaluate bacteriophage therapy effectiveness in bacteremia, cystic fibrosis lung infections, prosthetic join infections, diabetic foot osteomyelitis, and others. Consequently, the concern is that the medical community is moving too fast before we have a foundation of knowledge needed to properly evaluate bacteriophage therapies in specific infectious conditions. This lack of knowledge exposes upcoming clinical trials to be prone to fail. While failures are bound to happen, the inherit risk is that further negative clinical trial outcomes will set the field of bacteriophage therapy back and severely temper the interest in this therapeutic. This is problematic because bacteriophage therapy has enormous potential to be a remedy to the dire antibiotic resistance crisis that is amongst us. Therefore, it is important for the scientific community to realize our limited knowledge of bacteriophage therapy at this nascent stage and not be dissuaded by negative clinical trial outcomes. Rather, the scientific community needs to systematically research how to utilize bacteriophage in ways that will create effective and reproducible outcomes.

Read here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10096-023-04658-x