Being an effective bacterium -killer is not enough. Now, the team is adding other properties. One is an ability to disrupt biofilms .these are sheet-like colonies formed by pseudomonas (and other bacterial species) over the surface of the tissue they are infecting. Biofilms are defensive structures . by banding together to form them, bacteria make it harder for viruses for viruses to attack and harder for drugs to penetrate.
Dr Farah also hopes to add what might be called resistance to resistance, for-just as has happened with antibiotics-natural selection will inevitably shape how the target bacteria respond to viral attack. bacteria have their own immune systems that recognize and destroy viral genes. This leads to an arms race as the viral genes evolve to evade detection . Dr Farah thinks he can give his viruses a head start, slowing down the evolution of resistance.
He hopes, too, to make his phages invisible to the human immune system . even though phages are harmless to people, the immune system still recognizes them as alien and attacks them. Dr Farah plans to slow this attack, giving them a better chance to work.so far ,all this has proved effective in the modern equivalents of petri dishes .the team has now started tests in animals .lf all goes well, they hope to begin human trials in two years’ time. lf those work, antibiotics may ,at last ,have a serious rival.