Living medicine

A living medicine is a type of biologic that consists of a living organism that is used to treat a disease. This usually takes the form of a cell (animal, bacterial, or fungal) or a virus that has been genetically engineered to possess therapeutic properties that is injected into a patient. Perhaps the oldest use of a living medicine is the use of leeches for bloodletting, though living medicines have advanced tremendously since that time.

Examples of living medicines include cellular therapeutics (including immunotherapeutics), phage therapeutics, and bacterial therapeutics, a subset of the latter being probiotics.

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