The USSR after WWII had their problems, they were struggling to provide enough antibiotics to the general public. To make up for the lack of mainstream treatment, the government promoted natural treatments such as herbs, since they are from “Here”. Another appeal to the alternative treatment of phage therapy is the low cost, comparing to the manufacture of antibiotics, phage vials were easier and cheaper to produce on a large scale. With the government’s attempt to discredit “Western drugs” such as antibiotics and to promote alternative treatments, phage therapy was used commonly in the Soviet Union.
The major reason that contributed the two different outcomes for the respective research centers is that the political climate of the USSR and its satellite countries, since the collapse of the USSR, the Eliava Institute lost funding and demands for phage therapy. On the other hand the Phage Therapy Center was able to flourish primarily due to the death of Stalin, and later on, Poland joining the EU. However, both institutes contributed greatly to phage research.
In order to find a phage strain that could effectively evade the entrapment of the RES, the team first grew phage on the WT bacterial strain CRM1 and the mutated type CRM2(the strain was used in hopes of inducing the mutations in phage lambda), then they injected the mice with phage and collected blood samples after 7 hrs. The phage collected in the samples were purified and amplified and reinjected into a mice, the experiment was repeated until they the phages injected into the system remained a high concentration after 18 hrs.
The consideration of using phage therapy in most cases is to counter antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains. But these newly founded companies look to develop treatments that utilize phages to potentially cure diseases, not to just be the alternative treatment to bacterial strains with drug resistance. An important concept for phage therapy mentioned in the book is that if you can get the right phage to the right pathogen it’ll work, developments and expansions of phage therapy should look to this as their guild lines, besides finding more phage strains to add to the ever-growing library constructing a way for labs to find the right phage strains faster and amplify them for patients is much more important from my perspective. For more phage therapy treatments to be approved more tests and trials have to be performed, one of the most important experiment is the double-blind test, with a large enough sample size and the right methods(double-blind) the results of phage therapy can be backed up with solid data, even though the book mentioned the villages that excepted treatment and the ones that didn’t have vastly different mortality rate tests with a more rigorous setting is essential. Trials aside proper PR is very important since the discovery of antibiotics phage therapy has faded into the background, hence the name “The Forgotten Cure”, more noise promoting the upsides of phage therapy might help investors to hear about and gain confidence in this resurrected field of treatment.
