Phage Therapy Collaboration and Compassionate Use

Abstract

Antibiotic resistance is a worsening global problem, and phage therapy can be an option for some patients when antibiotics fail. While not approved as a medicine in most of the world, especially in countries that practice Western medicine, phage therapy is being increasingly practiced on a compassionate basis in countries where it has not previously been widely done. Due to the complexity of treating patients with phages, especially in the absence of extensive phage therapy experience, multidisciplinary collaborations and new systems are helping to address current gaps to make compassionate phage therapy possible for more patients around the world. This chapter provides an overview of the general process of treating multidrug-resistant bacterial infections with compassionate phage therapy, with a focus on how it has been done in regions without established phage therapy infrastructure, especially within the last 3 years. We provide several recent examples of compassionate phage therapy that depict both the challenges and how collaborations have led to solutions. Lastly, we provide examples of new systems and organizations that have been created to facilitate compassionate phage therapy, with an emphasis on the online platform Phage Directory.