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Phage therapy and the public: Increasing awareness essential to widespread use

Today, the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) crisis is shaping a world where previously treatable infections can kill. This has revitalised the development of antibiotic alternatives, such as phage therapy. The therapeutic use of phages, viruses that infect and kill bacteria, was first explored over a...

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Autores principales: McCammon, Sophie, Makarovs, Kirils, Banducci, Susan, Gold, Vicki
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10194857/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37200291
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285824
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author McCammon, Sophie
Makarovs, Kirils
Banducci, Susan
Gold, Vicki
author_facet McCammon, Sophie
Makarovs, Kirils
Banducci, Susan
Gold, Vicki
author_sort McCammon, Sophie
collection PubMed
description Today, the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) crisis is shaping a world where previously treatable infections can kill. This has revitalised the development of antibiotic alternatives, such as phage therapy. The therapeutic use of phages, viruses that infect and kill bacteria, was first explored over a century ago. However, most of the Western world abandoned phage therapy in favour of antibiotics. While the technical feasibility of phage therapy has been increasingly investigated in recent years, there has been minimal effort to understand and tackle the social challenges that may hinder its development and implementation. In this study, we assess the UK public’s awareness, acceptance, preferences and opinions regarding phage therapy using a survey, fielded on the Prolific online research platform. The survey contained two embedded experiments: a conjoint and framing experiment (N = 787). We demonstrate that acceptance of phage therapy among the lay public is already moderate, with a mean likelihood of acceptance of 4.71 on a scale of 1 (not at all likely to accept phage therapy) to 7 (very likely to accept phage therapy). However, priming participants to think about novel medicines and antibiotic resistance significantly increases their likelihood of using phage therapy. Moreover, the conjoint experiment reveals that success and side effect rate, treatment duration, and where the medicine has been approved for use has a statistically significant effect on participants’ treatment preferences. Investigations altering the framing of phage therapy, to highlight positive and negative aspects, reveal a higher acceptance of the treatment when described without using perceived harsh words, such as “kill” and “virus”. Combined, this information provides an initial insight into how phage therapy could be developed and introduced in the UK to maximise acceptance rate.
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spelling pubmed-101948572023-05-19 Phage therapy and the public: Increasing awareness essential to widespread use McCammon, Sophie Makarovs, Kirils Banducci, Susan Gold, Vicki PLoS One Research Article Today, the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) crisis is shaping a world where previously treatable infections can kill. This has revitalised the development of antibiotic alternatives, such as phage therapy. The therapeutic use of phages, viruses that infect and kill bacteria, was first explored over a century ago. However, most of the Western world abandoned phage therapy in favour of antibiotics. While the technical feasibility of phage therapy has been increasingly investigated in recent years, there has been minimal effort to understand and tackle the social challenges that may hinder its development and implementation. In this study, we assess the UK public’s awareness, acceptance, preferences and opinions regarding phage therapy using a survey, fielded on the Prolific online research platform. The survey contained two embedded experiments: a conjoint and framing experiment (N = 787). We demonstrate that acceptance of phage therapy among the lay public is already moderate, with a mean likelihood of acceptance of 4.71 on a scale of 1 (not at all likely to accept phage therapy) to 7 (very likely to accept phage therapy). However, priming participants to think about novel medicines and antibiotic resistance significantly increases their likelihood of using phage therapy. Moreover, the conjoint experiment reveals that success and side effect rate, treatment duration, and where the medicine has been approved for use has a statistically significant effect on participants’ treatment preferences. Investigations altering the framing of phage therapy, to highlight positive and negative aspects, reveal a higher acceptance of the treatment when described without using perceived harsh words, such as “kill” and “virus”. Combined, this information provides an initial insight into how phage therapy could be developed and introduced in the UK to maximise acceptance rate. Public Library of Science 2023-05-18 /pmc/articles/PMC10194857/ /pubmed/37200291 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285824 Text en © 2023 McCammon et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
McCammon, Sophie
Makarovs, Kirils
Banducci, Susan
Gold, Vicki
Phage therapy and the public: Increasing awareness essential to widespread use
title Phage therapy and the public: Increasing awareness essential to widespread use
title_full Phage therapy and the public: Increasing awareness essential to widespread use
title_fullStr Phage therapy and the public: Increasing awareness essential to widespread use
title_full_unstemmed Phage therapy and the public: Increasing awareness essential to widespread use
title_short Phage therapy and the public: Increasing awareness essential to widespread use
title_sort phage therapy and the public: increasing awareness essential to widespread use
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10194857/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37200291
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285824
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