Paving a regulatory pathway for phage therapy. Europe should muster the resources to financially, technically and legally support the introduction of phage therapy.

The increasing resistance of bacteria to antibiotics is a significant threat to human health and is a direct result of the excessive and improper use of these drugs. In 2007, multidrug-resistant bact erial strains infected more than 400,000 people in Europe and 25,000 patients died from the infections [1]. ‘Superbugs’ also have considerable economic impact: extra hospital costs and related productivity losses amount to more than €1.5 billion per year in the European Union. In the USA, infections caused by multidrug resistant bacteria lead to US$20 billion in additional health-care costs and US$35 billion societal costs annually [2]. The situation is about to get worse, as there are only a few drugs left to treat multidrug-resistant bacterial strains, and the first strains that are resistant to even these last-resort antibiotics have already emerged. Moreover, there is a dearth of genuinely novel antibiotics in the development pipeline.