Drug resistance, however, has been accelerated by global misuse of antibiotics. Phages, in contrast, can adapt to keep up with the bacteria, matching their prey mutation for mutation. It s a biological arms race, explains Sulakvelidze, a former Georgian lab director who worked extensively with the Eliava Institute. Back in Tbilisi, phages never fell out of fashion. They ve been in use in humans for 70 years with claims of miraculous results.
Phages offer other advantages over antibiotics.
For starters, they don t harm benevolent bacteria living in symbiosis with human hosts. But even with such positive traits, phages do have their downside. Rather than kill bacteria, some phages make them even more lethal. This happens, for example, with the bacterium that causes cholera. In the mid-1980s interest in the West was renewed when British and Polish researchers studied phage success against microbes in animals.