Nancy Knowlton

Alexander Sulakvelidze, Chief Scientist at Intralytix and one of its co-founders, says phages are a very safe and natural way of protecting food against bacteria. “The concept of using phages for improving food safety is based on simply applying phages back onto the foods in the right concentration, at the right place, and at the right time,” Sulakvelidze explains. “Thus, applying lytic phages onto foods to eliminate or significantly reduce the levels of pathogenic bacteria in those foods is one of the most, if not the most, environmentally-friendly, safe, and effective approaches available today,” he concludes. In the UK, the company Targeted Genetics has just changed its name to AmpliPhi Biosciences to emphasize its bacteriophage technology. Earlier this year, the company had acquired Biocontrol, whose lead product, a phage treatment for chronic ear infections, has just completed a clinical phase I and II trial. The company is also developing a phage treatment to combat Pseudomonas lung infections in patients with cystic fibrosis. Meanwhile, international corporation Nestlé is conducting a clinical trial using a cocktail of T4 phages against childhood diarrhoea in Bangladesh. The randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial overseen by Shafiqul Sarker in Dhaka, Bangladesh, enrols around 450 boys aged six months to two years with diarrhoea, provided they test negative for cholera and rotavirus. Equal numbers of the children will randomly receive either a new T4 phage cocktail or an established phage product from the Russian company Microgen, or a rehydration solution as placebo. The trial is due to be completed in June this year. Even if phage cocktails turn out to be no satisfactory solution, there is still the opportunity to learn from phages and to borrow some of their molecular arsenal, such as the lysins (FEMS Microbiol. Rev. (2009), 33, 801-819). In any case, it is clear, concludes Koskella, that “in our fight against pathogenic bacteria we have viruses on our side”.