Abstract
The emergence of multidrug resistant bacteria in both community- and hospital-acquired infections is recognized as a major public health threat. Phage therapy is increasingly mediatized and researched as an additional tool for combatting antibiotic resistant infections. However, phages exhibit a number of properties that differ from antibiotics and hamper their development as pharmaceutical products and their application in therapy. This paper advocates a paradigm shift in the development and application of infectious disease therapeutics to cater for personalized phage therapy, which could be realized by the year 2035. More specifically, it presents a sustainable and ethical supply chain of instant synthetic phages, based on a community effort, supported and steered by public health organizations, and managed by a platform combining Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Distributed Ledger (DL) Technology.
Highlights
Reviewed by: Stephen Tobias Abedon, The Ohio State University, United States Ronen Nissan Hazan, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
The emergence of multidrug resistant bacteria in both community- and hospitalacquired infections is recognized as a major public health threat
This paper advocates a paradigm shift in the development and application of infectious disease therapeutics to cater for personalized phage therapy, which could be realized by the year 2035
Summary
Bacteriophages (phages) are the viruses of bacteria. Since time immemorial they have controlled the growth and spread of their bacterial hosts. Fast forward to future Earth of 2035, a gloomy world characterized by human overpopulation, major ecosystem disruptions, global warming, and xenophobia While soaking in his bath, Dr John Iverian, a retired microbiologist, suddenly felt an extremely painful sting in the back of his neck, followed by a sound like a small plane’s propeller. DNA was extracted from the swab tip and the metagenome—all the genetic material present in the sample, including the infecting bacteria—was determined These genetic data were sent to a secured “Phage XChange” server where a complex AI-driven algorithm predicted the genome sequence of the phage that was most likely to lyze the infecting bacteria identified in the metagenome and was supposed to elicit the weakest immune reaction in the patient. The medical world had taken a while to realize that phage therapy did not need to be identical to antibiotic therapy, and this mainly because of the peculiarities of the active agents, the phages
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