(Knowable Magazine) – In promising experiments, phage therapy forces bacteria into a no-win dilemma that lowers their defenses against drugs they’d evolved to withstand

In the decades that followed, d’Hérelle and others used this phage therapy to treat bubonic plague and other bacterial infections until the technique fell into disuse after the widespread adoption of antibiotics in the 1940s.

But now, with bacteria evolving resistance to more and more antibiotics, phage therapy is drawing a second look from researchers — sometimes with a novel twist. Instead of simply using the phages to kill bacteria directly, the new strategy aims to catch the bacteria in an evolutionary dilemma — one in which they cannot evade phages and antibiotics simultaneously. (Read More)