The Pros And Cons Of Phage Therapy

Advantages and Disadvantages of Phage Therapy Even though phage therapy is a popular alternative to treating bacterial infections, it does not come with zero negatives. One of the biggest counters against phage therapy lies within the lack of successful studies (Hausler, n.d). Phage therapy has been studied extensively on animals, but there are few studies that show the efficiency of phage therapy on humans. This means that the scope of phage effectiveness on humans is not fully known (Hausler, n.d). Due to the lack of studies, no current phage therapy products are available in the United States or Europe (Lin, et al., 2017). Another disadvantage revolves around the unknown shelf life of phages, so this limits the time of application (Endersen, et al., 2014). Further research is needed in order to utilize phages effectively. One last disadvantage focuses on the size of the phages (Nilsson, 2014). Phages contain an attribute of an extremely small cell body, which makes it …show more content…
This leads to the reliability on inserting small amounts of phages in hopes it will successfully reproduce in the invasive bacteria to spread throughout the body. This characteristic of phages makes it so the results are not determinate and too much of it relies on chances (Nilsson, 2014).

Although there are some limitations to phage therapy, there lies many advantages in utilizing phages to fight bacteria. Arguably, one of the biggest advantages in phage therapy is the fact that they only target harmful bacteria and therefore have less side effects than antibiotics (University of Liverpool, 2017). Phages are very specific in that they target only certain bacteria (University of Liverpool, 2017). “Each phage is specific to the type of bacteria it