TKS Phage Therapy Module Wrap

I would have never guessed that the last explore module I did before deciding my focus was the one I chose to focus on, but here we are. Since I will be writing my learn article and doing my focus on phage therapy, I’ll give you a short rundown on what that is!

Phage therapy was discovered in 1915, but the research was abandoned when antibiotics were being researched more and proved to be effective in treating diseases. Now, bacteria are evolving and becoming immune to our antibiotics and most of our other treatments, which means we can be going back to a time when the common cold was lethal, and those almost incurable diseases will become nearly impossible to treat. This is where the research on phage therapy comes into play.

Bacteriophages (phages) are living viruses for bacteria that don’t have any harmful effect on the human body. Phages have a program in their genetic code that allows them to only target one specific bacteria or disease cell, making them less likely to surprise us with any unwanted side effects like other treatments tend to do. The idea is to take the required phages and inject them into your body to target the bacteria it is intended to target. The phage will then destroy that disease cell or bacteria in one of two ways:

It may use the lytic cycle, which is where the phage turns its targeted bacteria into a breeding ground where it can produce more phages identical to itself. When fully developed, the phages will break out of the bacteria, making it explode and die.

There is also the lysogenic cycle, where the phage injects its DNA into the bacteria’s chromosome, utilizing that bacteria as well as a nesting ground without having to kill its host.

Although it seems like there are many benefits to using phage therapy, and some even suggest that it will save us from these superbugs (a growing list of diseases and bacteria that are immune to every single antibiotic or treatment that we have), they are still not FDA-Approved in Canada or the US. I want to write my learn article about the different obstacles and factors that make this treatment so hard to implicate while going into more depth about the future applications of phage therapy. Some of those factors include cost, clinical trials, and the issue with how niche phages are.

I’m very excited to be focusing on Phage Therapy, and I can’t wait to see what else I will learn!

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