Phage therapy has been subjected to the influences of several varying cultures and political climates in countries such as Russia, India, Poland, and the United States. Each country viewed phage therapy differently than the other, ushering in a wide array of uses for phage in some countries such as Russia and Poland, while also being completely reduced to nothing in the others such as the United States.

During the 1940s-50s, Russia’s state health system influenced the treatment of infectious diseases greatly as the country could not rely on the use of “superdrugs” such as antibiotics to fight off infectious diseases. The country’s healthcare was supplemented purely by the government, and due to lack of funding and resources, the Russian people had to turn to alternative treatments to prevent infectious disease. With the withdrawal of financial support from the West after the end of World War II, the Russian government turned to propaganda to turn the citizens away from the “foreign Western antibiotics” urging them to use herbal remedies that were considered more patriotic and just. This turn away from traditional Western medicine allowed alternative treatments such as phage therapy to flourish in the Soviet Union as it was cost-effective and supported by the government’s propaganda.

Despite both the Phage Therapy Center and the Eliava Institute being under the rule of the Soviet Union, both institutions had vastly different outcomes regarding their phage research. The Eliava Institute, unfortunately, gained its peak during World War II at the height of Stalin’s reign of terror. During the war, it was primarily used to further bacteriophage research so that they could control the spread of infectious diseases on the battlefield, but once the war ended so did their usefulness. The institute’s leader, George Eliava, fell victim to Stalin’s reign of terror and was executed by the regime. Many did not return to the institute and it began to fall into disarray, but the institute is now running once again trying to further bacteriophage research. Unlike the Eliava Institute, The Phage Therapy Center in Wroclaw did not share the same fate and once the USSR fell, the Polish government continued to fund the institution’s research with phages. The center focuses now more on the use of bacteriophages to treat antibiotic resistant diseases, and even has received support from the European Union.

In the early 1990s, Carl Merril, Richard Carlton, and Sankar Adhya performed a revolutionary experiment that allowed them to select for phages that could evade the liver and spleen in their host organisms. This experiment was brought about as many attempts of phage therapy in animals seemed to fail as the phages would disappear in their host way too early to fight off any infection. To perform the experiment, the team first injected a phage they called “lambda” into the stomachs of mice. They waited for 7 hours, removed blood samples from the mice, isolated phages from the blood, and reinfected the mice with the isolated phage samples. They performed this task 8 times to isolate a phage that could remain in the bloodstream for at least 18 hours. The new phage that they isolated (Argo1 and Argo2) had a survival rate thousands of times higher than their parent lambda and proved they were still capable of curing mice from lethal doses of E. coli.

As the risk of antibiotic resistant bacteria continues to rise as more and more physicians rely on treating bacterial infections with antibiotics, several companies have begun to focus on alternative solutions to superbugs. One of which, GangaGen, focuses on developing therapeutic proteins that target drug resistant bacteria. GangaGen’s leading ectolysin P128 is one of those proteins, and it focuses on antibiotic resistant strains of Staphylococcus. Its incredible effectiveness comes from its ability to only attack its specific strain and leaves the rest of the beneficial bacterial flora intact. Most of these companies are trying to eliminate the incoming threat of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria by furthering the practice of phage therapy and are utilizing their natural ability to attack bacterial cells. Still, it is a long road ahead, and many more experiments, phages, and proteins need to be derived, isolated, and tested.