Poking around for Phage Theory, I stumbled upon this...
Virus fished from pond cures man's deadly antibiotic-resistant infection (March 2018)
arstechnica.com
... The clinical success suggests promising strategy for fighting antibiotic resistance.
In 2012, a 76-year-old Connecticut doctor had surgery to repair a life-threatening bulge in his aortic arch"the hulking bend that hooks the massive artery around the heart, routing oxygenated blood both upward and downward. Surgeons successfully used a synthetic graft to shore up the vital conduit. But soon after, a tenacious film of drug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria formed on the graft.
The doctor spent the next four years battling the infection, slipping in and out of the hospital. His surgeons and doctors at Yale deemed him too high risk for another operation and put him on mega-doses of antibiotics, prescribed indefinitely. The drugs couldn't clear the infection, they merely knocked it back enough to keep it from killing him. But the chronic inflammation that ensued took its own toll. His team of doctors started to worry his immune system was chipping away at his aorta. With a bleak outlook, the man agreed in 2016 to an experimental treatment: a virus that researchers had fished out of a nearby pond.
The viral gamble paid off. The infection cleared and he went off antibiotics, according to a case study published recently by the Yale researchers and doctors in the journal of Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health[1].
Phages for the ages
The case is a clinical win for using viruses when antibiotics fail to kill bacteria. It's an idea that has been around for decades. Viruses that exclusively infect and kill bacteria"called "bacteriophages" or just "phages""have been used in former Soviet republics and some parts of Eastern Europe for nearly a century. Phages kill in the same way as many viruses; a phage infects a host cell, usurps its cellular machinery to make copies of itself, then the clone army bursts out, destroying the host cell in the process. And there are plenty of phages to harness for potential therapies. In water samples, for instance, some researchers have estimated that there are 10 phages for every bacterial/archaeal cell. To put that in perspective, the open ocean is estimated to contain 1.2 1029 bacterial and archaeal cells.
But in Westernized countries, phage therapy has largely been passed over by researchers, given the success of antibiotics. As such, phages have failed to garner the needed research attention to establish their safety and efficacy. That's changing now, albeit slowly, with the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. ...
