Little vials of stale-tasting liquid full of anti-bacterial viruses can be bought from pharmacies all over Tbilisi
Mr Rud’s experience illustrates a growing problem—and one possible solution to it. Antibiotics are among medicine’s most spectacular achievements. A class of “silver bullet” drugs that destroy disease-causing bacteria while sparing the patient’s own cells, they have defanged all sorts of once-feared illnesses, from cholera to syphilis. They have drastically reduced the risks of surgery and chemotherapy, which destroys the patient’s immune system.
“Phages” are little known outside the former countries of the Soviet Union, which did the most to develop the idea. In Georgia they have been part of the local pharmacopoeia for decades. Little vials containing stale-tasting liquid full of anti-bacterial viruses can be bought at pharmacies across Tbilisi. Now, as worries about antibiotic resistance build, Western firms are taking a second look.Despite their name, bacteriophages infect, rather than eat, their prey.
A century ago, phages were the most promising tool in the antibacterial arsenal. Felix d’Herelle, a microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, used them to treat the first patient in 1919, after downing a dose himself to ensure they had no harmful effects. One of his colleagues was a young Georgian scientist named George Eliava, who returned home to found the institute that now bears his name.
That uncertainty has not stopped a wave of medical tourism to the Eliava Foundation’s Phage Therapy Centre. It treats more than 500 foreign patients a year. Most, like Mr Rud, are charged €3,900 for two weeks of on-site treatment and months’ worth of bottled phage to take home. Patients from more than 80 countries have visited the clinic.
Finally, the phages must be encouraged to grow, and the resulting solution purified. Although the number of laboratories that can replicate parts of this process is on the rise, Vakho Pavlenishvili, the Eliava Foundation’s head of phage production, says it remains the only place capable of handling the entire process from bacterial analysis through to phage prescription.
Even if the phages themselves cannot be patented, other things made from them can. Dressings or implants coated in phages are one example. Adaptive Phage Therapeutics has patented parts of its phage library and its high-speed manufacturing process. The firm hopes to be able to go from the identification of a bacterium to regulatory approval of a phage to kill it within six months. The same process could take 15 years for a new antibiotic, says Greg Merril, its founder.
Belgique Dernières Nouvelles, Belgique Actualités
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