Use of phage therapy to treat long-standing, persistent, or chronic bacterial infections

Abstract

Viruses of bacteria - known as bacteriophages or phages - have been used clinically as antibacterial agents for nearly 100 years. Often this phage therapy is of long-standing, persistent, or chronic bacterial infections, and this can be particularly so given prior but insufficiently effective infection treatment using standard antibiotics. Such infections, in turn, often have a biofilm component. Phages in modern medicine thus are envisaged to serve especially as anti-biofilm/anti-persistent infection agents. Here I review the English-language literature concerning in vivo experimental and clinical phage treatment of longer-lived bacterial infections. Overall, published data appears to be supportive of a relatively high potential for phages to cure infections which are long standing and which otherwise have resisted treatment with antibieiotics.

Keywords: Animal models; Antibiotic resistance; Bacteriophage; Bacteriophage therapy; Biofilm; Clinical treatment.