Assignment Topics: Phage As Medical Alternative Medicine

Faculty of pharmacy

Microbiology Department

Assignment Topic: Phage as medical alternative

Course Title: General Microbiology and Immunology

Course Code: PM204

Lab Group: E1

Prepared By: Ahd Mohamed Abdelmoniem Fahmi-175063

Due Date: 20-10-2017 Definition of phage:

Phage is a short for bacteriophage, which is virus that lives inside bacteria, and is a piece of nucleic acid RNA or DNA which is bordered by a coat that consists of capsid proteins. The natural host for the virus is bacterial cell. Phages differ in terms of the basic

In addition, phages can also overcome host resistance mutations. However, they can be eliminated by the body's defense mechanisms. Phage therapy has been used as an alternative to antibiotics. The use of natural phages to treat bacterial infection has very known history in the western medicine.

Antibiotics are one of the most successful forms of chemotherapy in the history of medicine. It is not necessary to reiterate here how many lives they have saved and how significantly they have contributed to the control of infectious diseases that were the leading causes of human morbidity and mortality for most of human existence. The antibiotic treatment choices for bacterial infections are very limited, resulting in high morbidity and mortality rates. Currently, there are some useful alternatives to antibiotic such as passive immunization and phage therapy. Antibiotics efficacy are dramatically

Polyphage therapy is the most common application for the phage cocktail, which is treatment involving the simultaneous use of more than one phage type. In vitro phage activity is not always predictive of in vivo therapeutic efficacy, efforts towards commercial development of phages as either therapeutic or more generally, bio control agents of bacteria , it is typically either broad host range monophages that are employed, an antilisteria food additive or phage cocktails. Researches about phage cocktails have increased recentlybecause of the start of the millennium owing to a number of insufficient to modest outcomes obtained while evaluating single phage preparations. This is not to imply that monophage therapy successes have not been seen, but rather that a number of strategies exist by which phage therapy outcomes may be improved. The use of phage cocktails can be summarized in combining of two or more phage types to produce more pharmacologically diverse formulations. The primary motivation for the use of cocktails is their broader spectra of activity in comparison to individual phage isolates: they can impact either more bacterial types or achieve effectiveness under a greater diversity of conditions. The combining of phages can also facilitate better targeting of multiple strains making up individual bacterial species or covering multiple species that might