Molecular aspects of biology (left) give rise to organismal characteristics (middle) which in turn can give rise to ecological consequences (right). Ecological consequences include impact on environments as well as environment impact back onto organisms (not shown). Within phage therapy as a pharmacological process, these ecological consequences—with a patient’s body serving as environment—can be viewed as being equivalent to considerations of pharmacodynamics (drug impact on body) and pharmacokinetics (body impact on drug), respectively. Physiology in turn is a description of how an organism’s molecular aspects as well interactions with environments combine to give rise to organism functioning. Here physiological aspects are indicated, in the middle of the figure, particularly in terms of phage organismal properties. Phage physiology, within a phage therapy context, thus can be viewed as a highly complex elaboration on how chemical form, that is, of phages, gives rise to ecological properties (in terms principally of bacterial eradication), just as a pharmaceutical’s chemistry gives rise to its pharmacological characteristics. Despite the complexity of a phage’s chemical form as well as the process of translation of that form into so-called pharmacologically emergent properties, such properties as side effects can be less likely than the case with less-complex, small-molecule drugs. This often low phage propensity towards toxicity presumably is a consequence of phages consisting primarily of DNA (or RNA) and proteins that have been molded by evolution to be highly specific in their impact towards modification of bacterial metabolism and structure rather than that of eukaryotic organisms such as ourselves [66]. Note that this figure is modified from one found in Abedon [109].
