Fitness Files: So how can we sum up action on phages?

Last week, I wrote about phages being the “new” hope for antibiotic-resistant infections.

I noted that in 1998, Dr. Alexander Sulakvelidze, a visiting researcher from the former Soviet Union, was “stunned to hear” that patients in the U.S. died of drug-resistant infections when he knew they could be helped by phage therapy. Western medicine abandoned phage therapy with the advent of penicillin, but its use in Eastern Europe continued from the late 1800s.

So why, a full 18 years after Sulakvelidze informed peers that it was an effective treatment against antibiotic-resistant infections, do we not use phage therapy? The dangers of such infections were enumerated by a 2013 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that said that at least 23,000 people in the U.S. die each year “as a direct result” of the growing threat.

Sulakvelidze founded Intralytix in 1998, which led me to believe that phage treatments would take hold in the U.S. I went on the company’s site and found three phage products controlling food processing contamination, but nothing for human infection.

However, under the site’s “Human Therapeutics” was this clear statement, “Therapeutic phage applications continue in the former Soviet Union and many Eastern European countries where therapeutic phage preparations … may be the only safe and effective approach currently available for saving a patient’s life.”

So I emailed Intralytix, asking why it doesn’t list a product to treat the thousands infected with antibiotic-resistant infections.

Sulakvelidze’ answer:

“Reviving phage therapy in the USA has been indeed very slow, for multitude of reasons, some of which are lack of finances and lack of right people to pursue it. As you know, Intralytix has been focused on food safety applications and we were quite successful in doing it.”

Note that Sulakvelidze’ company is developing a probiotic supplement, thus avoiding stringent FDA medication requirements.

Still looking to find out why Western medicine hasn’t called upon phages, I called UC Irvine’s infectious diseases department and was referred to Dr. Vincent Fischetti at Rockefeller University in New York City.

Here is what Fischetti told me:

“While phages work in principle, they have some issues, [such as] it’s difficult to get a [treatment] since it could be reproduced by others. Phage therapy companies have an uphill battle to approval.”

He said such therapies will take at least six or seven more years to show up in hospitals.

An Internet search turned up Laura Stokowski’s article in Medscape, “The Bacteriophage Comes of Age.”

Stokowski asks why phage therapy is not part of current Western medicine despite a century of extensive use in Eastern Europe and then cites “scientific, financial and regulatory hurdles facing its adoption.” She points out that animal studies are currently providing “convincing evidence” of the “safety and efficacy of phage therapy.”

So, we do not consider evidence from a century’s use in Eastern Europe but instead embark on new studies in this country.

The answer may be in “Phage Therapy: Current Research and Applications.”

It says bacteriophages have proved to be effective in combating multidrug-resistant bacterial infections but that “legal obstacles and intellectual property rights are impeding the implementation…. Owning patents is essential in our current industrial economic model. But natural phages are evolving biological lifelike entities and thus difficult to cover by patents.”

I had hope that we could use long-established European phage therapy to reduce the suffering of people whose lives are threatened by antibiotic-resistant disease, but I learned that a headline-grabbing article doesn’t equal action here in the U.S.

I’ve oversimplified a complex scientific discussion, but I deduce that our cumbersome FDA approval process linked with drug companies’ profit/loss model is costing lives.

The phage information is academic unless we or someone we love suffers an untreatable infection.

Then hopes for treatment become fervent prayers.

Newport Beach resident CARRIE LUGER SLAYBACK, since turning 70, has run the Los Angeles Marathon and the Carlsbad Marathon.