Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health concern, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug-resistant infections account for 2 million infections and 23,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.  The World Health Organization estimates that the threat of antimicrobial resistance will kill 50 million people per year by 2050.  Superbugs such as C. difficile (which accounts for about 15,000 of those deaths), CRE, Neisseria Gonorrhoeae, MRSA, Streptococcus Pneumoniae, Malaria, and MDR are some of the top superbugs that commonly fall into this category.  When antibiotics fail to work, there may be little to turn to in the medical world to prevent the downward spiral of a patient...
 

Bacteriophages have been around since the dawn of the planet and comprise the single most abundant life form on the planet.  There are an estimated ten million trillion trillion bacteriophages on earth.  A single drop of seawater can contain millions.  They exist in soil, water, and in excrement.  While they are harmless to humans, phages are deadly to bacteria and prevent bacteria from overrunning the planet.  Smaller than bacteria, bacteriophages have a very unusual appearance as you can see from this electron microscopic image.  The difficulty in broadening phages as a treatment protocol is the need for a host where the bacteriophage can survive long enough to see if can kill a specific bacterium.  If the phages do in fact find a specific bacterium, they insert their DNA into the bacterium and then replicate themselves so that it causes the bacteria to burst open with multiples of themselves.  The diagram below illustrates how this works....  

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