superbug_slayer

Yes, all that and more is described in The Perfect Predator. ThePerfectPredator.com

Agree!

As the author of the op-ed you are referring to, allow me to chime in. It's true that a huge effort went into saving my husband's life with phage therapy but as a result of that, it's getting easier to treat other cases. I'll comment on your other points too:

1) Broad spectrum phages don't exist in nature but gene-editing techniques can be applied and this technology now exists. Several biotechs are now working in this space.

2) Phages are not hard to keep 'alive'. They need to be refrigerated and kept away from sunlight.

3) True that phage therapy is relatively new in the West but the field is exploding. There are very few pharmas still developing antibiotics and very few in the pipeline, esp for gram-negatives, so there is an imperative to have alternatives to antibiotics.

With an ever-expanding phage library of well characterized phages, it is possible to generate personalized phage cocktails in days. An antibiotic takes a decade to develop, at around a billion $, and has collateral damage on the microbiome. For more on the story, check out ThePerfectPredator.com

I work in this area after curing my husband of a life-threatening superbug with IV phage therapy. That case has re-invigorated phage therapy in the West and there are several clinical trials that will start in 2019. Even if phage therapy isn't shown efficacious on its own, there is growing evidence of synergy between phage and antibiotics that itself is a game-changer. My husband and I wrote a book about our story which covers the strange history of phage therapy: ThePerfectPredator.com