With concern about antimicrobial resistance growing increasingly acute, it is perhaps a surprise that the science behind new drugs that could bolster threatened antibiotics was developed in eastern Europe, including under communism. But such is the case with ‘bacteriophages’, a buzzword in many medical circles at present, usually shortened to ‘phages’. A number of international conferences have already been held this year on the subject, which has been widely dubbed ‘the Year of the Bacteriophage’.
Little known in Western medicine, at least until recently, bacteriophages are viruses that infect and replicate within a bacterium to attack it. They have been in regular use in Poland, Georgia and Russia since the 1920s as a substitute for antibiotics. But today, with the growing resistance of many bacteria to antibiotics in developed countries, more attention has been focused on bacteriophages, which could soon move from the fringes into mainstream medicine as a result.
One major obstacle, however, is that almost all the clinical studies into phages have taken place in countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain, and that is proving an obstacle to their acceptance elsewhere.
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