Viridax™

Bacteriophage (bacteriophages, phage or phages) are parasitic viruses of specific bacteria, and are among the most abundant microbes on earth. Phage occur naturally wherever their host bacteria are found, such as in soil, water, sewage or any environment that will support bacterial growth, including in and on plants and animals. Importantly, however, bacteriophage are not infectious, parasitic or otherwise pathogenic to any plants or animals.

Phage are viruses that parasitize and kill specific bacteria. They attach to the outer surface of the host bacterium and inject their own viral DNA into the bacterial cell. The bacterial cell is now managed by the phage, and responds only to the phage's DNA instructions to make more phage viruses. The new phage components made by the bacterial host cell are then assembled inside the bacterium into multiple copies of new phage, which thereafter burst out of the bacterial cell, destroying the bacterium in the process.

Phage were first identified in the late 1800s and early 1900s by observation of their lytic effect on bacteria. Canadian microbiologist Felix d'Herelle used the virus to cure children in a Paris hospital dying from dysentery. After initial successes, d'Herelle continued exploring phage therapy at the Pasteur Institutes in Paris and Saigon, and later as health officer to the League of Nations in Egypt.

The fame of the new treatment spread, and soon western drug companies, such as Eli Lilly, were selling therapeutic phage in the 1930s. They were taken orally or topically, used in aerosols and as enemas, or they were injected. They were used to treat typhoid, cholera and urinary tract infections, among other infectious diseases. Many therapeutic successes were observed, but the results were unreliable A report commissioned by the American Medical Association concluded that evidence for the efficacy of bacteriophage therapy was ‘contradictory’, at best.

When penicillin was discovered in 1928 and the age of antibiotics was born, the use of phage therapy faded into insignificance, although phage therapy continued in Eastern Europe, including, for example, at The Eliava Institute in Georgia. Anecdotal evidence from large-scale clinical trials of various phage therapy preparations and techniques conducted in Poland in the mid-1980s claimed a decisive recovery rate of 92%.

Phage therapy in the west would have disappeared completely, had it not been for new developments in biotechnology, in parallel with the rapid decline in effect of antibiotics, all of which revived attention to phage as therapeutic alternatives. In addition, while all conventional antibiotics are considered toxic by the FDA, there has not yet been any toxicity associated with bacteriophage. Also, the costs for producing bacteriophage are far less than those for most antibiotics, especially the latest generation products that are used to treat resistant infections.