bacteriophage therapy is the practice of administering phages as
antibiotics. The bulk of the early work in this area was done by
Felix d'Herelle at the
Pasteur Institute in the early
20th century. His findings showed promise, but were the subject of much
controversy in the medical community. The science of his day lacked the technology to
identify,
isolate, and
prepare phages for medical use, so when conventional antibiotics were introduced in the
1940's, the study of phages as
medicine all but ceased in the west.
Work continued in some of the Soviet block countries of Eastern Europe, and as antibiotic resistant bacteria have arisen in alarming numbers, medical researchers have begun to turn to institutions like the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wroclaw, Poland and the Bacteriophage Institute in Tblisi, Georgia for information.
There is much work still to be done before phages become a mainstream therapy for bacterial infections, but they hold good promise, and are once again being taken seriously by the world medical community.
This subject is discussed in greater detail at phage therapy.