Wolfkeeper

It's not easy at all, it's actually cutting edge research, and immunity of this organism to antibiotics is a *massive* problem in dermatology. Whole long lists of drugs no longer work at all on most patients, and it's getting worse. And more than 80% of people suffer from acne at some time in their lives. p.s. The phages that exist for it are not suitable to kill it, they're for identifying the organism. There's no phage therapy on the market at all.

I was looking into doing phage therapy against a bacteria that's on almost everyone's skin called Propionibacterium Acnes. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propionibacterium_acnes You should be able to isolate it off your own skin, it shines in ultraviolet, and AFAIK is not particularly hard to grow. There do exist phages that kill it (that can be bought commercially- fairly expensive several hundred dollars!), but with care you might be able to find them living in the wild. It should be safe to handle, because everyone is covered with it anyway. If you can find a phage with it, in principle you could use it to clear up or improve people's acne (but the phages are very specific, so what works for one person may not work for another). If you have a biology professor he might well be able to help you out with it. There was a patent somewhere or other with instructions on how to isolate the bacteria from the other bacteria that lives on people's skin. Pretty much AFAIK mostly all you need is some growth medium, agar plates, somewhere to keep it (body temperature), an ultraviolet light, and some chemicals to kill off other bacteria, and maybe a few other things like jam jars and equipment to collect samples. Could be fun, but there's absolutely no guarantee you'd succeed! So the experiment would be; collect bacteria, grow it, show that it's the right bacteria. Then try collecting phage from various places (sewers, people's skin etc.) and seeing if you can kill it. If you manage to do that, you could multiply up the phage and put it through a ceramic filter and you're done, stick it in the fridge.

Ummmm. Phage don't cause increase in cancer rates in any way. They don't infect humans at all. They can however change the behaviour of bacteria, and this can make them more pathogenic (or less pathogenic for that matter). Cholera for example can occur when a Cholera phage infects a particular, otherwise harmless bacteria. But this isn't such a problem for phage therapy- the phages chosen are ones that kill the bacteria and do not trigger pathology. The only major worry I'm aware of is that phages could theoretically transfer antibiotic resistance from one bacteria to another; but it's never been seen in real life, and because the phages kill bacteria so well, it's very unlikely to be ever seen.