ArticlePharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland)2021
Phage Therapy in the 21st Century: Is There Modern, Clinical Evidence of Phage-Mediated Efficacy?
Article in Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland), 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 41 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
41 citing papers in PubMed, 58 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Joint Action of Bacteriophage and Antibiotics in the Treatment ofbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Characterization, genomic insights and anti-biofilm potential of phage vB_PaeM_PKMS3, a lytic Pbunavirus capable of infecting clinical Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates.Antonie van Leeuwenhoek · 2026Article
- Limitations and safety aspects related to the use of bacteriophages in food production.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Article
- Isolation and characterization of a lytic phage and its efficacy against multi-drug resistant strains of pseudomonas aeruginosa.European journal of clinical microbiology & infectious diseases : official publication of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology · 2026Article
- An Integrated Workflow for Phage Selection, Amplification, and Surface Modification.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2026Article
- Avian PathogenicVeterinary sciences · 2025Review
- Dysbiosis and Therapeutic Modulation of the Gut Microbiota in Multiple Sclerosis: A Narrative Review.Health science reports · 2025Article
- Review
- Bacteriophage resistance evolution in a honey bee pathogen.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2025Article
- Exploration of Providers' Perceptions and Attitudes Toward Phage Therapy and Intentions for Future Adoption as an Alternative to Traditional Antibiotics in the US-A Cross-Sectional Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- Bacteriophages RCF and 1-6bf can control the growth of avian pathogenic Escherichia coli.Poultry science · 2025Article
- In Vitro Susceptibility of Clinical and Carrier Strains ofInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Bacteriophage entrapment strategies for the treatment of chronic wound infections: a comprehensive review.Archives of microbiology · 2024Review
- Phage-Antibiotic Combination Therapy against RecurrentAntibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Proportion of patients with prosthetic joint infection eligible for adjuvant phage therapy: a French single-centre retrospective study.BMC infectious diseases · 2024Article
- Potential of an Isolated Bacteriophage to InactivateAntibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Microbiome Dynamics: A Paradigm Shift in Combatting Infectious Diseases.Journal of personalized medicine · 2024Review
- Cell-free synthesis of infective phages fromSynthetic biology (Oxford, England) · 2024Article
- The untapped potential of phage model systems as therapeutic agents.Virus evolution · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Many bacteriophages are obligate killers of bacteria. That this property could be medically useful was first recognized over one hundred years ago, with 2021 being the 100-year anniversary of the first clinical phage therapy publication. Here we consider modern use of phages in clinical settings. Our aim is to answer one question: do phages serve as effective anti-bacterial infection agents when used clinically? An important emphasis of our analyses is on whether phage therapy-associated anti-bacterial infection efficacy can be reasonably distinguished from that associated with often coadministered antibiotics. We find that about half of 70 human phage treatment reports-published in English thus far in the 2000s-are suggestive of phage-mediated anti-bacterial infection efficacy. Two of these are randomized, double-blinded, infection-treatment studies while 14 of those studies, in our opinion, provide superior evidence of a phage role in observed treatment successes. Roughly three-quarters of these potentially phage-mediated outcomes are based on microbiological as well as clinical results, with the rest based on clinical success. Since many of these phage treatments are of infections for which antibiotic therapy had not been successful, their collective effectiveness is suggestive of a valid utility in employing phages to treat otherwise difficult-to-cure bacterial infections.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.