Phage therapy meeting at the Institut Pasteur, Paris

 

In the summer of 2002 I was researching in the archives of the Institut Pasteur for "Viruses vs. Superbugs". Obviously, I was most interested in the estate of Félix d'Herelle which is kept there. I also had some discussions with researchers based at the Pasteur, and they were rather sceptical about phage therapy.

Other groups and companies are preparing such a step, I was told at the meeting.

However, there are two cautionary points to make here. First, all of these studies are at a very early stage. There are not very many meaningful results in yet. Second, phage therapy is still a somewhat unknown entity to the regulatory agencies. Therefore, most researchers have to operate in unclear circumstances. Also, different researchers seem to have different views on what types of treatments they are currently allowed to do and what is illegal.

Clarifications on these issues would probably benefit the field a lot. See f.i. the paper ‘European regulatory conundrum of phage therapy‘ by J. Verbeke et al.

Maybe the field would profit a lot if researchers would mount a collaborative effort to clarify things in the regulatory arena and talk together to the regulatory agencies?

 

Especially Harald Brüssow emphasized in his talk that safety considerations should be paramount for everybody in the field. I agree. Just think of what would happen to the field if a patient would be hit by an adverse incident – it may not even be linked to the therapy itself. When this happened in gene therapy trials it had an enormously negative effect on the field.

 

There will be another meeting on phage therapy on February 22, 2008 in the UK. Speakers include Paul Barrow, Nick Housby (Novolytics) and Mikael Skurnik. See link below this entry for more information.

 

 

One of Félix d'Herelles more controversial ideas about phages was his emphasis on the ecological nature of infections. He thought that phages had the most important function in combatting bacterial infections, be it on the scale of an epidemic or be on the scale of a single infected patient. From this view stem f.i. his experiments in India, where he poured cholera phage in the drinking wells of villages to combat cholera epidemics. However, only very few scientists were willing to consider such a radical view.

Interestingly, there has been some evidence in the recent past which corroborates d'Herelles view. For example, S. M. Faruques intriguing studies about the role of phage in cholera epidemics in Bangladesh (discussed in "Viruses vs. Superbugs").

Now, people seem to be even willing to look with d'Herelles view on the single patient scale: In Plos One there was just a very interesting paper by A. Gaidelyte et al. which looked at the phage production of people with systemic staph infections. They found that most staph infecting people carry prophages and they were able to isolate these phages from the blood of the infected patients. Interestingly, these phages were active against many staph strains (of course, excluding the one that carries them). It will be interesting to see if these researchers go on to investigate further what role phages have in bacterial infections.