A new book, written by leading doctors, explains how cutting-edge research can help fight viruses To find future treatments for infections, we might have to look back at the past.
Before the discovery and advent of antibiotics, doctors had an altogether different strategy to treat bacterial infections. The treatment is called phage therapy, and it uses special viruses called bacteriophages or phages for short.
Phages are harmless to humans, but they infect and kill bacteria. In 1923, the George Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia, pioneered the use of phages to treat human infections.
The very same treatment from the 1920s is now being used to treat modern bacterial infections resistant to many drugs. The problem with repeatedly using the