Abstract

Following a sixty-year hiatus in western medicine, bacteriophages (phages) are again being advocated for treating and preventing bacterial infections. Are attempts to use phages for clinical and environmental applications more likely to succeed now than in the past? Will phage therapy and prophylaxis suffer the same fates as antibiotics — treatment failure due to acquired resistance and ever-increasing frequencies of resistant pathogens? Here, the population and evolutionary dynamics of bacterial–phage interactions that are relevant to phage therapy and prophylaxis are reviewed and illustrated with computer simulations.

Author affiliations

1. Bruce R. Levin is at the Department of Biology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30307, USA.
2. James J. Bull is at the Section of Integrative Biology and Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.

Correspondence to: Bruce R. Levin¹ Email: blevin@emory.edu

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