Words about science and hiking
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 …
Clinical research on phage therapy is somewhere between comatose and dead. A search through ClinicalTrials.gov reveals only a few sporadic attempts at bringing PT to the clinic. Many of these are Phase 1 safety/dosing trials which have no apparent follow-up: A 2008 P1 trial of PT for venous leg ulcers found no adverse events, but no difference in outcomes Read More …
The rise of diabetes in the developed world has brought along a rise in persistent ulcers and abscesses. These infections don’t respond particularly well to either systemic or topical antibiotics and as a result, an unfortunately high proportion are resolved by amputation. This is nobody’s notion of an acceptable medical outcome. Phage therapy has been Read More …