Decades after being slighted in favor of antibiotics, phages are attracting interest as therapeutic candidates that can overcome bacterial resistance

By Katarina Zimmer

Soon after bacteria-killing viruses were independently discovered by English physician Frederick Twort in 1915 and by French microbiologist Felix d’Herelle in 1917, the tiny microbes were seen to have therapeutic potential. Twort suggested that bacteria-depleted zones on his culture plates could have been caused by an “ultra-microscopic virus,” but he cautiously allowed that they might have been due to a strictly bacterial process of some kind. d’Herelle was bolder. He quickly focused on what he called the bacteriophage—the “eater of bacteria”—and whether it could be used to fight infections.

Indeed, in 1919, d’Herelle and his colleagues administered a cocktail of different phages to a 12-year-old boy with dysentery, who reportedly recovered within days. Early successes such as these prompted interest in the development of phage therapy—at least until the advent of broad-spectrum antibiotics. Antibiotics progressed so quickly that interest in using viruses to treat bacterial infections soon waned in the United States and Western Europe.

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