Phage vs. Antibiotics

Before we completely dive into the topic at hand let’s first breakdown exactly what antibiotics and bacteriophage or “phage” is. Since antibiotics have a more historical background we’ll start there. Antibiotics are a type of antimicrobial designed to target bacterial infections within (or on) the body (Microbiology, 2021). In ancient Egypt it was a common practice to apply moldy bread to infected wounds, but it wasn’t until 1928 that Alexander Fleming created penicillin, which was the first true antibiotic (ACS, 2021). During that time humans felt as if we had found the holy grail to all of our bacteria related problems and we did, but there was only one little problem. The antibiotics that we were using to kill off certain bacteria were not only killing the infected bacteria, but also the healthy ones. That was not the only problem, we had to deal with genetic mutation, which is when bacterial DNA, stores the bacteria's information and codes for its traits, randomly changes or mutates, thus making it immune to antibiotics and causing it to mutate. Bacteriophage would never!

Bacteriophage is a virus that has a specific type of bacterium that it is attracted to, this process is called “phage specificity.” In this process it parasitizes a bacterium with its DNA and reproduces itself inside of it causing it to constantly reproduce itself. Since it only targets a certain bacterium it does not harm other healthy bacteria in the phage specificity process. This could possibly help cure many illnesses such as: cancer, leprosy, and many other bacteria related illnesses. You may be asking yourself why health professionals do not use this instead of antibiotics being that antibiotics are so last year, but the reason is due to the fact that it has not been FDA approved yet despite its constant success stories. There was an FDA approved trial in 2019 for phage therapy, but it is still not regulated in the US or Europe. From what you know so far about antibiotics and bacteriophage, why do you think the FDA has not approved it? Could it be that it could cause a downfall to Big Pharma if approved? Leave a comment below and stay tuned for my Phage vs. Antibiotics series :)

-Fatima Komoro