Schlesinger Nailed It! Assessing a Key Primary Pharmacodynamic Property of Phages for Phage Therapy: Virion Encounter Rates with Motionless Bacterial Targets.

Bacteriophages (phages) are viruses of bacteria and have been used as antibacterial agents now for over one-hundred years. The primary pharmacodynamics of therapeutic phages can be summed up as follows: phages at a certain concentration can reach bacteria at a certain rate, attach to bacteria that display appropriate receptors on their surfaces, infect, and (ideally) kill those now-adsorbed bacteria. Here, I consider the rate at which phages reach bacteria, during what can be dubbed as an 'extracellular search'.

How Simple Maths Can Inform Our Basic Understanding of Phage Therapy.

Phage therapy is the application of bacterial viruses to control and, ideally, to eliminate problematic bacteria from patients. Usually employed are so-called strictly lytic phages, which upon adsorption of a bacterium should give rise to both bacterial death and bacterial lysis. This killing occurs with single-hit kinetics, resulting in relatively simple ways to mathematically model organismal-level, phage-bacterium interactions.

Automating Predictive Phage Therapy Pharmacology.

Viruses that infect as well as often kill bacteria are called bacteriophages, or phages. Because of their ability to act bactericidally, phages increasingly are being employed clinically as antibacterial agents, an infection-fighting strategy that has been in practice now for over one hundred years. As with antibacterial agents generally, the development as well as practice of this phage therapy can be aided via the application of various quantitative frameworks.

Translating phage therapy into the clinic: Recent accomplishments but continuing challenges.

Phage therapy is a medical form of biological control of bacterial infections, one that uses naturally occurring viruses, called bacteriophages or phages, as antibacterial agents. Pioneered over 100 years ago, phage therapy nonetheless is currently experiencing a resurgence in interest, with growing numbers of clinical case studies being published. This renewed enthusiasm is due in large part to phage therapy holding promise for providing safe and effective cures for bacterial infections that traditional antibiotics acting alone have been unable to clear.

Bacteriophage Adsorption: Likelihood of Virion Encounter with Bacteria and Other Factors Affecting Rates.

For ideal gasses, the likelihood of collision of two molecules is a function of concentrations as well as environmental factors such as temperature. This too is the case for particles diffusing within liquids. Two such particles are bacteria and their viruses, the latter called bacteriophages or phages.