Phage therapy: current review and future perspectives

In recent years, antibiotic resistance develops very quickly, while it is difficult to find new antibiotics. It is speculated that by 2050, the number of deaths due to antibiotic resistance will exceed the number of cancer deaths, reaching 10 million, it seems that people will return to the pre-antibiotic era. The problem of drug resistance has become so serious that some researchers looking for alternatives to antibiotics have refocused their attention on phage therapy, a method of using bacterial viruses to cleave pathogens to achieve therapeutic effects. It has the advantages of specificity, lack of cross-resistance to antibiotics, an excellent curative effect on biofilm, short research time, and relatively low development cost. At present, there are more and more successful cases of phage therapy. This paper will review the phage therapy, analyze its advantages and disadvantages so that readers can better understand phage therapy to promote the development of phage-based treatment of bacterial infection.