From:
Infection based Control Technologies - R&D Management (Frost & Sullivan)
"As for phage therapy (bacteriophages) there might be a point in the future when phages will be less effective to the pathogens compared to when they were first developed. However, bacteriophages are readily available in nature and they have been evolving over billions of years with bacterial strains. Phage preparation can be enhanced by replacing or including those isolated from the environment. On the contrary, antibiotics get stuck with their core molecule. Developing a new drug requires huge R&D efforts and overhead to combat multidrug-resistant bacteria. This market has been pretty much neglected by the top tier pharmaceutical companies, says the analyst. Although there are organizations to address this situation and alarm bells have been sounded, implementation is still a far cry."
From Wikipedia:
"As there exist estimates of bacterial numbers on Earth of approximately 10^30, there consequently is an expectation that 10^31 or more individual virus (mostly phage) particles exist , making phages the most numerous category of "organisms" on our planet."
But the questions are:
Are there more Lytic phages or more Lysogenic phages for example in Acinetobacter baumannii or in Mycobacterium ulcerans or in other genera ?
Are there Lytic Phages or are there not Lytic Phages for all genera?
What is the frequency rate between Lytic phages (%?) and Lysogenic phages (%?) capable to growth in each of these Bacteria ?
Lytic phages> Lysogenic phages ?
or
Lysogenic phages >Lytic phages ?
or
no Lytic phages but only Lysogenic phages ?
From the book " BACTERIOPHAGES" the probable answer: "Lysogenic bacteria are very common in nature and probably constitute the principal reservoir of bacteriophages."
The success of Phage therapy depends how we are able to give these answers.
Phage Therapy and the Fatal Blow
For example:
"As has been known for at least thirty years, mycobacterias such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis have specific bacteriophages.
No lytic phage has yet been discovered for Clostridium difficile, which is responsible for many nosocomial diseases, but some temperate phages (integrated in the genome) are known for this species, which opens encouraging avenues."
