Phage therapy to treat unresponsive infections: A primer for the clinical microbiology laboratory staff
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the increase in antimicrobial resistance and subsequent need for alternatives to traditional antibiotics, phage therapy (PT) has gained a renewed interest. Much like antibiotics, bacteriophages or simply phages, have shown promise in eradicating bacterial infections; however, their fundamental differences require specific laboratory protocols and practices. As bacterial-specific viruses, they must be detected, replicated, and purified for safety and efficacy. The narrow spectrum of activity of phages provides a targeted approach to infection but also necessitates expansive libraries and susceptibility testing to match phages to bacteria. Such testing is not standardized, complicating both research and clinical efforts. This review then provides a background on PT in the clinical microbiology laboratory and an overview of such protocols and practices specific to PT, such as classic susceptibility testing methods and updated approaches. Also covered are the challenges and future directions for the field, as well as resources for clinical and research laboratory personnel.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".