Roy Brillon, a housepainter from Texas, watched as a bacterial infection ate away at his leg. It was an infection antibiotics couldn’t cure. If he wanted to live, he had limited options: he could amputate his leg, or he could turn to an alternative treatment.

According to a March 2009 Popular Science article, Brillon decided to gamble on phage therapy an experimental treatment that isn’t widely available in the United States. His doctor had to travel to the former Soviet Union to get the unproven treatment. But once the phage solution was poured on the wound, the infection vanished within days.

Bacteriophages are viruses that infect and kill bacteria. Felix d’Herelle, a French-Canadian microbiologist discovered bacteriophages in 1917 and subsequently developed an early form of phage therapy. But after the discovery of penicillin in 1941, U.S. scientists lost interest in phage therapy. Antibiotics provided fast and easy cures. But, as we know, microbes are constantly changing to survive a blast with an antibiotic and so we are now faced with a rising tide of superbugs –bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

The beauty of phage therapy is that phages evolve too. Phage therapy has the potential to cure bacterial infections caused by superbugs.

So far, researchers have reported preliminary results on small human trials of phage therapy for chronic ear infections, leg ulcers and other conditions. Scientists will have to prove that phage therapy is safe and effective in very large clinical trials before the therapy is available on the market, and such research will take years to complete.

Meanwhile, another potential treatment for one of the most common conditions caused by bacterial infections, sepsis, might be found in statins, cholesterol-lowering medications.

A recent article in Archives of Internal Medicine explains that the body typically has an intense inflammatory response to sepsis, and certain statins can inhibit that response, as demonstrated in animal trials involving Staphylococcus aureus alpha toxin. Other statins reduce intracellular growth of Salmonella. According to the authors, Statins may be good candidates as novel therapeutic agents for the treatment and prevention of sepsis because they target a number of pathways that are dysregulated during the sepsis process and because of their direct antimicrobial effects.

But, while statins are generally accepted as well-tolerated drugs, they can have an adverse effect on liver function, a particular problem for sepsis patients, in whom hepatic dysfunction is common. This just underscores the need for randomized, placebo-controlled trials to prove efficacy against bacterial infection.

There are more than 750,000 cases of severe sepsis in the United States each year and 30% of people with the condition die. This death toll is equivalent to that from heart attacks, though the populations are different–sepsis often occurs in immuno-compromised individuals.

In a world of increasing resistance to antibiotics, exploring novel therapies is a crucial part of the fight against infection. If effective, they could aid conservation of antibiotics and decrease selection pressure for resistance, benefiting the public good.

In cases such as Roy Brillon’s they may be someone’s only hope.