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Bacteriophages are viruses infecting bacteria and archaea. Many phage speciescause infections which lead to the certain death of the infected prokaryotichost cell and the release of a large batch of phage progeny, yet they have beenable to stably coexist with their bacterial hosts over the eons in nature, aswell as in the majority of laboratory experiments reported in the literature.This possibility of a stable coexistence between populations of bacteria andbacteriophages can be suspected to critically reduce the chances of asuccessful therapeutic application of bacteriophages for combatting pathogenicbacterial infections in vivo. Here, we extend an established differentialequation model describing the interaction of bacteria, bacteriophages, and thehost immune system, modelling different degrees of spatial heterogeneity of thehost organism by introducing a scaling parameter which alters the encounterrates of the different cell populations. We demonstrate by rigorousmathematical analysis that, depending on the degree of spatial heterogeneity,the system will either converge to the desired state of bacterial and phageextinction, to a state of persisting bacterial infection with a completelyeliminated bacteriophage population or to an equally undesirable state of astable long-term bacteria-bacteriophage coexistence. We additionally providenumerical solutions of the model to illustrate the emerging dynamics anddiscuss some implications for bacteriophage therapy.

On the persistence of lytic bacteriophages in vivo and its consequences for bacteriophage therapy