After surviving a crippling traffic accident and dozens of operations to repair the damage, to him life in a wheelchair just did not seem worth living.

That's when an article about a clinic in Georgia offering an obscure treatment for hard-to-treat infections using live virus -- something called phage therapy -- caught his eye. 

Within hours, he was on a plane to Tblisi.

"Without it, I wouldn't be here," Novou told AFP on the sidelines of a conference in Paris about the mostly forgotten therapy, which remains marginal outside a few former Soviet bloc countries. 

The treatment harnesses viruses called phages to attack and kill dangerous bacteria, including "superbugs" which have become progressively resistant to antibiotics.

In Novou's case, it was Staphylococcus, a common bacteria which can cause anything from a simple boil to horrible flesh-eating infections.