Reinventing the fight against bacteria,
one phage at a time.

Some of the most difficult bacterial infections are not defined solely by antibiotic resistance. Their persistence often depends on biofilms, highly organized microbial communities in which bacteria become embedded within an extracellular matrix and adopt physiological states that can make conventional antimicrobial treatment considerably less effective. Understanding whether bacteriophages and antimicrobial peptides can overcome this barrier is therefore becoming an important direction in the search for new strategies against antimicrobial-resistant infections. This question lies at the centre of the doctoral research of Laura Marsal Martinez at the University of Pisa. Marsal is part of METAMIC3, a European Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network focused on microbiomes, metaproteomics and microbial effectors. Her project investigates the activity of bacteriophages and antimicrobial peptides against bacteria growing either freely in planktonic cultures or embedded within biofilms. The ...

A peer-reviewed clinical case published in Clinical Infectious Diseases has provided one of the most unusual demonstrations yet of how engineered bacteriophages might eventually be integrated into precision antimicrobial medicine. Investigators from the University of California San Diego, working with the Danish biotechnology company SNIPR Biome, administered SNIPR001, a cocktail of four genetically engineered CRISPR-Cas-armed bacteriophages, to a kidney-transplant recipient suffering from progressive malakoplakia caused by multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli. The therapy was provided under a single-patient emergency Investigational New Drug authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration and was used alongside an extensive conventional treatment regimen rather than as a stand-alone therapy. The case is remarkable not simply because an engineered phage product was administered to a patient with a resistant bacterial infection. It brings together several of the most difficult pr...

Bacteriophages occupy an unusual position in biotechnology. In medicine, they are being rediscovered as highly specific antibacterial agents capable of attacking pathogens that no longer respond to antibiotics. Inside an industrial fermenter, however, exactly the same biological efficiency can become a serious manufacturing hazard. A phage that reaches a susceptible production strain can replicate through an entire bacterial culture, disrupt fermentation and compromise a batch that may have taken considerable time and resources to establish. Phage Consultants's team : (left) Patrycja, Joanna, Marcin, Klaudia, Klaudyna A new Polish research and development project is addressing this less visible side of bacteriophage biology. Phage Consultants Marcin Łoś has received European funding to develop PhageSense, a platform intended to automate the detection of bacteriophage infections in bacterial cultures, including cultures operating inside bioreactors. The project was selected within t...

There are moments in biotechnology when an advance is important not because it immediately produces a medicine, but because it changes what scientists can reasonably imagine designing. The publication in Science of “Generative design of bacteriophages with genome language models” belongs to that category. Samuel H. King, Claudia L. Driscoll and colleagues report what they describe as the first generative design of complete bacteriophage genomes using genome language models. From thousands of computational sequences, they chemically synthesized hundreds of candidate genomes and ultimately recovered 16 viable bacteriophages capable of infecting Escherichia coli. More strikingly, a genetically diverse cocktail assembled from the generated phages suppressed bacterial populations that had evolved resistance to the natural phage from which the design framework had begun. A rendering of a virus created by an A.I. model. Credit Credit... By Samuel H. King Et Al. The significance of the experim...