A CONNECTION WITH INDIA GOING BACK TO 19TH CENTURY

Phages and India have an intimate connection dating back to 1896, when British chemist Ernest Hankin published about the bactericidal action of the “Jumna and Ganges” in the Annales de l’institut Pasteur – a likely description of phage action.

In 1915, British bacteriologist Frederick Twort, discovered an “agent” that killed bacteria but his work was interrupted by the first world war. Independently, Frenchcanadian microbiologist Félix d’hérelle announced in 1917 that he had discovered an “invisible microbe” that killed bacteria.

A significant chunk of his work focused on India. William Summers notes in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences that in 1920 during a trip across Indo-china, d’herelle isolated a strain of antiplague bacteria and in February 1926, sent it to the Haffkine Institute in erstwhile Bombay.

Two months later, he travelled to Bombay to figure out why the phages were performing poorly — it turned out that the ideal phage medium contained pork and beef, and the institute had been forced to use alternatives, thereby affecting performance.

In 1927, d’herelle returned to India to work on cholera with the backing of the government — at the height of the freedom movement — and a newspaper interview in May 1927 is often considered the first popular literature in India on the subject. Later that year, he isolated anti-cholera phages from patients and garnered global attention.

But it proved counterproductive because phages would never work on a large scale to arrest citywide cholera infections. This also coincided with a global slowdown of phage research as over the next two decades, the United States and Europe took the lead in mass manufactured drugs and economies of scale in the pharma industry. Phage research receded to behind the iron curtain, in the erstwhile Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), pioneered by an associate of d’herelle, Georgi Eliava, in Tblisi.