I wonder if the soviet approaches to health sciences in this space, and phage therapy represents the happy outcome of cost constraints and politics. Soviet science was set back decades by Lysenko. It looks like the politics leaked into antibiotic research, and people who wanted to cure diseases had to look at other approaches.

As a veteran of the pharma industry, I've studied some old school medications from the Soviet era. Many are still available from eastern European countries. It's fascinating reading to see the "non-Western" (and far cheaper) approaches. Some probably work in significant performance-enhancing ways, judging from the occasional Olympic athlete disqualification that pops up in the news