In the normal state the human body has ten times as much bacteria cells and a bunch of phages that attack those bacteria.
Bacteria phages don’t infect human cells, which many part of the immune system do care about. Whether the immune system will start attacking some phages depends a lot on the context.
In many cases when fighting an infection you have the problem that the host immune system doesn’t effectively work.
In periodontitis for example periodontopathogens like Porphyromonas gingivalis, synergistically disarm host defence systems as a recent review paper on using phage therapy for it describes. In the paper they write about immune system interaction:
Human immune system evolved to tolerate phages to which it is constantly exposed. Safety and clinical trials have confirmed that phages are non-toxic and are harmlessly cleared from the body
The paper seems to the conclusion that periodontitis seems like a good target for treating with phages given the success of existing studies but regulation makes it hard. It suggests in the end that one way to get around the regulation might be to focus first on veterinary medicine as there’s less regulation.
How do phages interact with the host immune system? My naive model is the immune system would regard them as an infection and start to suppress.
In the normal state the human body has ten times as much bacteria cells and a bunch of phages that attack those bacteria.
Bacteria phages don’t infect human cells, which many part of the immune system do care about. Whether the immune system will start attacking some phages depends a lot on the context.
In many cases when fighting an infection you have the problem that the host immune system doesn’t effectively work.
In periodontitis for example periodontopathogens like Porphyromonas gingivalis, synergistically disarm host defence systems as a recent review paper on using phage therapy for it describes. In the paper they write about immune system interaction:
The paper seems to the conclusion that periodontitis seems like a good target for treating with phages given the success of existing studies but regulation makes it hard. It suggests in the end that one way to get around the regulation might be to focus first on veterinary medicine as there’s less regulation.
That’s really cool. Thanks for the pointer!