Phages, towards a targeted alternative to antibiotics

With the rapid development of antibiotics in the 1930s, phage therapy – using viruses known as bacteriophages or phages to tackle bacterial infections – fell into oblivion. But as the current rise in antibiotic resistance is making it increasingly difficult to treat bacterial infections, phage therapy is once again sparking interest among physicians and scientists – although it remains complex in practice because of the great diversity and specificity of phages. Against this backdrop, scientists from the Institut Pasteur, Inserm, the Paris Public Hospital Network (AP-HP) and Université Paris Cité have developed a simple and effective new tool that recommends the best possible phage cocktail for a given patient. They did so by developing and training an artificial intelligence model capable of making a tailored selection of phages based solely on the genome of the targeted bacteria. The results of this research, published in the journal Nature Microbiology, pave the way for personalized phage therapies to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.

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