How it began
Bacteriophages were discovered by Félix d'Herelle at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, so the discovery itself belongs to France. In the early 1920s the Georgian bacteriologist Giorgi Eliava repeated d'Herelle's experiments there and became his collaborator. In 1923 Eliava founded an Institute of Bacteriology in Tbilisi, the forerunner of today's Eliava Institute. D'Herelle spent about 18 months in Georgia between 1933 and 1935, and the two planned a world center of phage research and phage therapy in Tbilisi.
How it works
Phage therapy uses bacterial viruses to treat bacterial infections. The virus acts directly and only on its target bacterium and destroys it through a process called lysis. At the Eliava center, a clinical sample is analyzed to identify the bacteria, and a preparation is chosen or made from phages with a wide range of activity against them. Because phages are specific, they spare other bacteria in the gut, and new phages can be sought as bacteria change.
How it spread
In the Soviet period the institute became one of the largest microbiology facilities in the USSR. It was a major supplier of phages for frontline hospitals to treat lacerations, gangrene and intestinal infections, and after the war the Red Army remained its main customer, using phages to reduce dysentery and salmonellosis among soldiers. As the Scientific-Industrial Union Bacteriophage it employed roughly 800 people and produced phage preparations by the ton.
Who pushed back
D'Herelle's colleagues at the Pasteur Institute did not accept his view that bacteriophages were living things and mostly ignored him. In Georgia the project was cut short by Stalin's Terror. Eliava was executed in 1937, and d'Herelle never came back. A history in the journal PHAGE notes that Eliava's work was largely erased afterward, though the institute survived his death.
Where it stands today
The Eliava Institute of Bacteriophages, Microbiology and Virology still works in Tbilisi and keeps a large collection of phages. Its phage therapy center, with specialists in pediatrics, internal medicine, urology and gynecology, receives patients from around the world with chronic or antibiotic-resistant infections. The institute describes itself as one of the few centers in the world dedicated to phage therapy.
