From the standpoint of someone who works in healthcare epidemiology and has always been fond of phage therapy, a few reasons:
1) Even with resistance on the rise, we still have antibiotics that work. Phage therapy is a "someday we're going to need this...we think" type treatment.
2) There's no such thing as a "broad spectrum" phage. They're organism specific, and that means not only would you need to keep a phage library on hand, but you'd have to do a lot of diagnostic tests. That's going to be both expensive and tricky.
3) Phages are living things. Not only is that a weird regulatory framework to be in for a drug, but it also means that you need to be able to keep phage alive. In contrast, antibiotics are inert.
4) Phage therapy is also relatively new in the West, which means there's just less of a R&D infrastructure behind it.
There have been people working on commercializing phage therapy since I was in undergrad (I'm now a tenure-track professor). The problem is it's hard, and antibiotics are so much better as a treatment that there's kind of a ceiling on the excitement that they can generate.
1) Even with resistance on the rise, we still have antibiotics that work. Phage therapy is a "someday we're going to need this...we think" type treatment.
2) There's no such thing as a "broad spectrum" phage. They're organism specific, and that means not only would you need to keep a phage library on hand, but you'd have to do a lot of diagnostic tests. That's going to be both expensive and tricky.
3) Phages are living things. Not only is that a weird regulatory framework to be in for a drug, but it also means that you need to be able to keep phage alive. In contrast, antibiotics are inert.
4) Phage therapy is also relatively new in the West, which means there's just less of a R&D infrastructure behind it.
There have been people working on commercializing phage therapy since I was in undergrad (I'm now a tenure-track professor). The problem is it's hard, and antibiotics are so much better as a treatment that there's kind of a ceiling on the excitement that they can generate.