once a closely kept secret of USSR's microbiologist to combat the coming antibiotic resistance

Once dismissed as fringe, phage therapy is gaining traction as a last resort when antibiotics fail. It's the subject of a new episode of the Netflix docuseries Follow This.

Paige Rogers had been connected to an IV at a hospital in Lubbock, Texas, for 25 days last year when her doctor came in with lab results showing she'd run out of options. The infection colonizing her lungs was no longer responding to antibiotics.
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On day 25 of her hospital stay, her doctor confirmed her family's worst fears: The antibiotics she'd depended on for most of her life were no longer working. Rogers had become one of the millions of people in the US infected with so-called superbugs, bacteria that have evolved to thwart all of our existing antibiotics.
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It took Chan about a month to find phages that were a strong match for Rogers' infection. He flew over to Lubbock to hand-deliver them to her, and her doctors began their treatment.

The phages were delivered to her body through a nebulizer, which turned them into a mist that could be breathed straight into her lungs. Rogers inhaled the vaporized viruses for 20 minutes to an hour each day.

The medicine worked slowly. But after 10 days or so, her doctors began to see a response. After another round of phages in February, Rogers' infection began to completely clear. And by March, she said, she felt better than she'd felt in years. Her lung function had drastically improved, and she felt strong enough to go back to work and live her life outside of a hospital.

She received another maintenance dose of phages this summer. Her lungs were not only still clear of the debilitating infection, but even better, the phages had weakened the bacteria in her system enough that they'd started responding to antibiotics again.

Few people in the US have been able to try phage therapy in the past few years, and it hasn't always worked. For example, the case of a 25-year-old cystic fibrosis patient named Mallory Smith made headlines in 2017 after a lung transplant left her besieged with an infection, but she died before scientists could find out if the phages worked.

Chan has worked with hospitals to treat five patients to date, and is helping some 50 others who have reached out looking for help. But as long as patients are treated on a case-by-case basis, he warns, the treatment will not reach everyone who needs it.

Chan is hoping to start a clinical trial testing phages on cystic fibrosis patients in the next year. Another group, at the newly founded Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH) at University of California, San Diego, is also planning to launch a clinical trial in the near future, in collaboration with private biotech companies. IPATH was launched after a UCSD professor of global health, Steffanie Strathdee, convinced the medical school to use phages to save her husband's life from a deadly superbug infection in 2016.

"I think in the next five years, this should be through clinical trials, and we should know for a fact whether it's worth pursuing, and whether we could actually help out a bunch more people with it," Chan said.

But challenges remain, including jumping through hoops with the FDA to approve living, custom-made medicines, as well as the economic hurdle of patenting a product that exists in nature.

Meanwhile, Rogers is back working part-time at a girls clothing store in her town. She's thinking of having kids, a possibility she'd never considered before she'd heard about phages. She breathes easier these days, she said, knowing her medical team can always find new phages if she gets sick.