Abstract
Following a sixty-year hiatus in western medicine, bacteriophages (phages) are again being advocated for treating and preventing bacterial infections. Are attempts to use phages for clinical and environmental applications more likely to succeed now than in the past? Will phage therapy and prophylaxis suffer the same fates as antibiotics — treatment failure due to acquired resistance and ever-increasing frequencies of resistant pathogens? Here, the population and evolutionary dynamics of bacterial–phage interactions that are relevant to phage therapy and prophylaxis are reviewed and illustrated with computer simulations.
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Acknowledgements
We thank S. Adhya, M. Lee, C. Merril, I. Mouleux, and the members of the EcLF for stimulating and useful discussions and commentary. We also wish to acknowledge and, now that we made the revisions, express our gratitude, for the considerable effort the anonymous reviewers put into an earlier draft of this article and for the value of their comments and suggestions. This enterprise was supported by grants from the IPRAVE/Wellcome Trust and the US National institutes of Health, J.J.B. is also supported as the J. Friedrich Miescher Professor at the University of Texas. We dedicate this article to the memory of H. Williams Smith.
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Levin, B., Bull, J. Population and evolutionary dynamics of phage therapy. Nat Rev Microbiol 2, 166–173 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro822
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro822
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