Enhancing and initiating phage-based therapies

Drug development has typically beena primary foundation of strategy for systematic, long-range management of pathogenic cells. However, drug develop-ment is limited in speed and flexibility when response is needed to changes in path-ogenic cells, especially changes that produce drug-resistance. The high replication speed and high diversity of phages are potentially useful for increasing both response speed and response flexibility when changes occur in either drug resistance or other aspects of pathogenic cells. We present strategy, with some empirical details, for (1) using mod-ern molecular biology and biophysics to access these advantages during the phage therapy of bacterial infections, and (2) initi-ating use of phage capsid-based drug deliv-ery vehicles (DDVs) with procedures that potentially overcome both drug resistance and other present limitations in the use of DDVs for the therapy of neoplasms. The discussion of phage therapy includes (a) his-torical considerations, (b) changes that appear to be needed in clinical tests if use of phage therapy is to be expanded, (c) recent work on novel phages and its potential use for expanding the capabilities of phage ther-apy and (d) an outline for a strategy that encompasses both theory and practice for expanding the applications of phage ther-apy. The discussion of DDVs starts by reviewing current work on DDVs, includ-ing work on both liposomal and viral DDVs. The discussion concludes with some details of the potential use of perme-ability constrained phage capsids as DDVs