Words about science and hiking
One of the ways that science journalism continually fails the public is by ignoring the Valley of Death that lies between discovery and product development. The problem is especially acute in healthcare, where the maddening complexity and unpredictability of clinical responses dooms most “breakthroughs” to failure. The problem is less ignorance on the part of Read More …
Phage therapy isn’t ever going to be the cure-all envisioned by overly-enthusiastic science writers. But it doesn’t have to be. Curing some patients of some indications is a noble and worthy goal in and of itself. And maybe when we learn to use phage therapy in limited applications, we can start thinking about tackling sepsis Read More …
Giant viruses are cool. Their genomes are bigger than those of many bacteria (especially endosymbionts), and they encode many housekeeping functions that are not obviously necessary for the viral lifestyle. They blur boundaries between the neat little categories we use to describe biological entities and thus remind us that those categories are conveniences, not reality. Read More …
I often despair when I read some of the papers that pass for phage therapy science, so it’s nice to see a couple of very solid contributions published this month. Neither are attention-grabbing reports of cures of patients who had failed antibiotic therapy and were at death’s door. You won’t see a word about them Read More …
Alzheimer’s rivals sepsis as the La Brea Tarpits of the pharma industry. 400+ clinical trials of new therapies were run between 2002-2012. They yielded exactly one approval. And that was for a drug (memantine) which treats symptoms but does not affect the course of the disease. Memantine was cleared in 2003; no new drugs have Read More …
I often worry that I am too hard on clinicians, mocking them for their credulity and innumeracy. Medicine is hard, and I would much rather be treated by a doctor who is innumerate and a careful listener than one who knows the difference between a standard error and a standard deviation but doesn’t listen to Read More …
I promised that rather than just bitching about crappy phage therapy papers I would offer some thoughts about applications where PT could be successful and have an impact. None of my suggestions will have the drama of PT swooping in to rescue a dying patient for whom doctors had given up all hope. But they Read More …
I’m going to take a break from writing about terrible phage therapy papers. Frankly, they are all very much alike, as the same errors get repeated over and over. It’s depressing for me to write these posts and I suspect it is getting to be a bit boring for you to read them. So let’s Read More …
Not much to say about this that I didn’t say in a previous post. Once again, researchers are claiming to advance the field of phage therapy by using mice as animate test tubes: mice are injected with pathogenic bacteria, followed shortly (or concomitantly) with a dose of phage. The phage kill the bacteria, the mice Read More …
One can sum up the 100-year history of phage therapy concisely: works great in the lab, fails in the clinic. Not a single Phase 2 or 3 clinical trial has yet shown phage therapy to be effective. This failure is not due to a lack of research effort. Search for “phage therapy” in PubMed and Read More …