What role does phage therapy play against antibiotic resistance?

The phagotherapy It is a medical procedure that can have very important implications in our relationship with people. bacteria. Next we delve a little more into this therapy medicine and its impact on our health.

What is phage therapy?

According to doctors Jordi and Nuria Reina in their article for the NCBIPhagotherapy is an alternative treatment that consists of the use of phages to solve the problem of bacterial resistance that some bacteria have developed against the drugs that should kill them.

Los phages are viruses that infect bacteria by injecting their genetic material into them. The phage expands within the bacterium, eventually causing it to explode, thus allowing the phage to expand to infect more bacteria.

Given the phages can destroy bacteriaits use has been proposed to destroy bacteria dangerous to the human body because, despite the fact that phages cannot destroy all possible species of bacteriathey can eradicate those that have become resistant to antibiotics.

Problems around phage therapy

As promising as phage therapy is, there are some drawbacks that still prevent it from being a commercial treatment and widely used in medicine.

The pharmaceutical industry has not made a greater effort to prepare phages for human use through medical treatment, so this therapy is not fully developed and Not all the implications it can have on us are known.

On the other hand, world health authorities have not regulated the medical use of phages because it was not expected that they could be used for the benefit of patients, so there are no production, quality or safety guidelines.

Many studies are still required to determine the feasibility of phage therapy as a completely controllable and safe therapeutic procedure for the health of the patient, so it cannot yet be used on a large scale.