Phage therapy: an attractive option for dealing with antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections

The discovery of ‘compound 606’ (trade named ‘Salvarsan’) – the first ‘magic bullet’ for fighting bacterial infections – by Paul Erlich in 1909 is considered the birth of chemotherapy. The search for new ‘magic bullets’ increased in subsequent years, and it focused on identifying novel and safe compounds effective against bacterial infections. The discovery of antibiotics during the 1940s was the pinnacle of this process, and it revolutionized medicine from that point forward. Hundreds of antibiotics have been developed by various pharmaceutical companies since Eli Lilly pioneered the production of penicillin more than half a century ago, and many of them are currently available for clinical use. Antibiotics have saved more lives than any other drugs in the history of humankind, and their phenomenal success led the USA’s Surgeon General to declare, during the late 1960s, that it was time to close the book on bacterial diseases. Indeed, partially triggered by this type of sentiment and, more importantly, by financial considerations, many large pharmaceutical companies have recently been ‘closing the book’ on developing new antibiotics, and they have been redirecting much of their R&D activities to more lucrative targets, such as drugs for treating chronic conditions. This trend and the increasing emergence of antibioticresistant bacterial pathogens could have very serious public health ramifications. In that regard, a recent report by a special Task Force co-chaired by the CDC, FDA and NIH stated that ‘The world may soon be faced with previously treatable diseases that have again become untreatable, as in the pre-antibiotic era’ [1].