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CLINICAL MICROBIOLOGY

Treat phage like living antibiotics

Nature Microbiology volume 5, pages 391–392 (2020)Cite this article

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Bacteriophage therapeutics has emerged as one of the few potential beacons that represent possible solutions to the growing global crisis of antimicrobial resistance. Bringing science to the bedside (and vice versa) will maximize the potential of this compelling opportunity.

Robert Redfield, Director of the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, stated in 2019 that we should “stop referring to a coming post-antibiotic era. It’s already here”. Bacteriophages (phages) have been parasitizing and shaping evolution of their bacterial prey for 300,000,000 years1,2. The primary battlefield for the estimated 1031 unique phages and 1012 microbial species has been the natural environment, but skirmishes occur continuously within and on surfaces of all animal and plant species3,4. In the century during which these ‘eaters of bacteria’ became known to science, enthusiasm about phages as bona fide antimicrobial therapeutics has fluctuated widely5. Phages have been administered for decades in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe — generally as crude lysates but rarely parenterally. In this issue of Nature Microbiology, Jonathan Iredell’s Westmeade Hospital group contributes to a growing consensus that it is time to rigorously evaluate phages in the urgent effort to develop novel approaches to the global crisis of multidrug-resistant bacterial infections6.

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Fig. 1: Phage evolution: from sideshow to centre stage.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics, Division of Infectious Disease and Global Public Health, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Robert T. Schooley & Steffanie Strathdee

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  1. Robert T. Schooley
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  2. Steffanie Strathdee
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Correspondence to Robert T. Schooley.

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Competing interests

R. T. S. serves as a consultant to CytoDyn and has stock options in CytoDyn and Antiva Biosciences. He is a member of the Gilead Sciences Scientific Advisory Board and previously served as an uncompensated member of the AmpliPhi Scientific Advisory Board. S. S. holds stock in Adaptive Phage Therapeutics and is an uncompensated scientific advisor to NextBiotics.

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Schooley, R.T., Strathdee, S. Treat phage like living antibiotics. Nat Microbiol 5, 391–392 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-019-0666-4

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