WHO Launches a Global Bacteriophage Community of Practice to Connect the Phage Ecosystem

The initiative was introduced through the online webinar “Connecting the Global Bacteriophage Community”, held on 27 July 2026 from 14:00 to 15:30 Central European Summer Time. The meeting marked the beginning of the new community rather than a stand-alone scientific event. Although the inaugural webinar has ended, the Community of Practice remains accessible through the WHO IHS Global Hub and is intended to provide an enduring environment for professional exchange.

Participation is open through the WHO IHS Global Hub. Applicants must complete the official membership form with their professional position, organisation, organisation type and a brief explanation of why they wish to join. When selecting a community, they should request access to the WHO AMR Community Exchange. After approval and login, members can locate the bacteriophage community through the platform’s group exploration section. The former standalone AMR Community Exchange website now confirms that the community has moved to the IHS Global Hub, making the Hub the current official entry point.

The platform is relevant to established phage specialists, but its scope is deliberately broader. Clinical microbiologists, infectious disease physicians, pharmacists, molecular biologists, bioinformaticians, regulatory scientists, bioprocess engineers, biotechnology companies, veterinarians, agricultural researchers, public health professionals, patient representatives, students and early-career scientists may all contribute perspectives that are necessary for responsible phage development. The wider IHS Global Hub allows members to initiate thematic discussions, participate in WHO-organised webinars, share resources and events, connect with other professionals and contribute to collective learning.

The Community of Practice should not be confused with a clinical treatment programme. It does not provide patients with phages, identify treating physicians or authorise individual therapies. It is also not a funding call, a clinical trial, a regulatory approval pathway or a WHO endorsement of any particular phage product or company. Its immediate function is coordination: bringing together actors who often work on different stages of the same translational pathway but rarely operate within a shared international structure.

This distinction is important because contemporary phage therapy depends on far more than the discovery of viruses capable of killing bacteria. A clinically useful programme may require pathogen identification, bacterial isolation, phage susceptibility testing, genome sequencing, bioinformatic safety assessment, manufacturing, purification, formulation, quality control, regulatory review, clinical administration and long-term monitoring. Few institutions possess all of these capabilities internally, and the absence of coordination can delay treatment, duplicate effort and prevent potentially useful data from being compared across centres.

The inaugural webinar was announced as an opportunity to present findings from a global survey of the bacteriophage ecosystem, highlight the activities of major regional and international phage networks and identify shared priorities for future cooperation. The new community also builds on bacteriophage activities previously associated with the WHO Regional Office for Europe, while expanding the discussion into a more explicitly global platform covering research, clinical development, regulation and policy. Detailed results from the ecosystem survey and a complete public programme of future activities had not yet been released on the accessible WHO pages at the time of publication.

The creation of this forum follows several years of increasing WHO attention to bacteriophages as possible tools against antimicrobial resistance. In May 2025, WHO Europe and the Global Antimicrobial Resistance Research and Development Hub published the report “Building the Evidence for the Use of Bacteriophage Therapy”. The report emerged from the Vintage Innovation initiative and synthesised discussions from webinars, expert consultations and a dedicated workshop held in Tbilisi, Georgia. It examined phages through a One Health perspective encompassing human, animal and environmental applications rather than treating human clinical therapy as an isolated field.

WHO describes bacteriophages as viruses that infect bacteria with high specificity and do not infect human cells. Their ability to kill bacteria that no longer respond to antibiotics has renewed interest in phage therapy, particularly as the discovery and development of new conventional antibiotics remain scientifically difficult and economically challenging. At the same time, WHO stresses that phages are not approved as routine biological medicines in most countries and are commonly accessed through compassionate or exceptional pathways when standard treatments have failed. More evidence from appropriately designed clinical studies is required before broad therapeutic use can be justified.

The specificity of phages is one of their principal advantages, but it is also a central translational limitation. An antibiotic may act against a broad group of bacteria, whereas a phage may infect only a subset of strains belonging to the same species. Successful treatment therefore requires accurate microbiological diagnosis and access to sufficiently diverse phage collections. It also requires testing methods capable of distinguishing genuine productive infection from superficial bacterial clearing caused by high phage concentrations or phage-associated enzymes.

Greater international convergence around phage susceptibility testing could become one of the most valuable outcomes of a global professional community. Laboratories currently use different bacterial media, incubation conditions, inoculum densities, phage concentrations and interpretation criteria. Spot testing is convenient for rapid screening, but it does not always demonstrate that a phage can complete its replication cycle. More quantitative approaches can include efficiency-of-plating measurements, adsorption experiments, time-kill studies, phage amplification assays and resistance-frequency analysis.

The clinical meaning of these measurements remains an open question. A phage that performs strongly on an agar plate may encounter a very different environment inside a chronic wound, lung, urinary tract, prosthetic biofilm or poorly vascularised tissue. Bacterial receptor expression can change with growth conditions, while mucus, extracellular matrices, immune clearance and local chemistry can restrict phage access. A global exchange between microbiologists and clinicians could help determine which laboratory parameters best predict therapeutic activity in particular infection settings.

Manufacturing presents another area in which shared knowledge is urgently needed. An environmental phage isolate is not automatically a pharmaceutical product. Therapeutic candidates must be genetically characterised, propagated in an appropriate bacterial host, separated from cellular debris and formulated in a way that preserves biological activity. Crude phage lysates may contain bacterial proteins, nucleic acids, membrane fragments, residual culture components and endotoxins. Purification must reduce these contaminants without causing unacceptable losses in infectious phage concentration.

The diversity of phages makes universal manufacturing procedures difficult to establish. Virions differ in morphology, surface properties and sensitivity to filtration, agitation, temperature, pH, freezing and long-term storage. A process optimised for one phage may perform poorly with another, while cocktails require the simultaneous preservation of several biologically distinct components. Dialogue between academic laboratories, hospital production units, biotechnology companies and regulators could help distinguish essential quality requirements from procedures that need to remain adaptable.

Clinical development raises a related tension between standardisation and personalisation. A fixed cocktail is easier to manufacture, distribute and evaluate in a conventional trial, but it may fail against genetically diverse clinical isolates. A personalised preparation can be matched to the patient’s bacterial strain, yet its composition may change from one case to another. Regulatory frameworks designed for medicines with a fixed active substance are not always well suited to products that may need to evolve alongside bacterial epidemiology.

The WHO Community of Practice cannot resolve this tension by itself, but it can create a setting in which regulators understand the biological constraints of phage development and scientists better understand the evidence required for clinical and regulatory decisions. Discussions may also help clarify how fixed products, adaptable cocktails, personalised preparations, engineered phages and phage-derived enzymes should be evaluated without assuming that every category can follow an identical pathway.

Clinical evidence remains one of the most pressing priorities. Modern phage therapy includes many compelling compassionate-use cases, but individual recoveries are difficult to interpret when treatment also involves antibiotics, surgery, drainage or intensive supportive care. Case reports can demonstrate feasibility, identify possible safety issues and reveal unusual biological responses, but they cannot determine general efficacy or the optimum dose, route and duration of treatment.

Prospective trials must account for the biological characteristics of phages while preserving methodological rigour. Patient enrolment based only on bacterial species may be insufficient when individual isolates differ in phage susceptibility. Trials may require rapid pre-enrolment testing, predefined procedures for replacing inactive components and coordinated microbiological follow-up. Pharmacokinetic interpretation is also unusual because phages may be cleared, neutralised or spatially restricted, but they may also replicate when they encounter sufficient numbers of susceptible bacteria.

The community’s One Health dimension is equally important. WHO recognises possible phage applications in human medicine, animal health, agriculture, food production and selected environmental settings. Veterinary use could reduce antibiotic consumption in livestock, while agricultural phages may help manage bacterial crop diseases. Food applications can target pathogens on products or production surfaces. These sectors share fundamental questions about host range, resistance, formulation and manufacturing, but each operates under different ecological and regulatory conditions.

International coordination could also improve equity. Personalised phage therapy currently depends heavily on access to specialised laboratories, sequencing infrastructure, phage banks and regulatory expertise. Without deliberate cooperation, treatment may remain concentrated in a limited number of well-connected hospitals and high-resource systems. Shared databases, transparent protocols, distributed susceptibility-testing networks, training programmes and technology transfer could make participation more geographically inclusive.

As of 1 August 2026, the public WHO IHS Hub continued to display the Bacteriophage Community of Practice and invited new members to join its communities. The inaugural webinar was marked as completed, but no comprehensive public calendar of subsequent bacteriophage meetings, formal working groups or published conclusions from the global ecosystem survey was yet available. Future activities should therefore be described cautiously until WHO releases additional information.

The institutional importance of the initiative should nevertheless not be underestimated. Bacteriophages have been studied for more than a century, yet their modern development remains dispersed among local research traditions, compassionate-use programmes, clinical trials, national regulatory experiments and relatively small industrial pipelines. A WHO-convened global community places the field more visibly within the international antimicrobial-resistance agenda and acknowledges that progress now depends on sustained coordination rather than isolated scientific success.

The central question is no longer whether phages can infect and destroy bacteria. Their antibacterial biology is well established. The challenge is whether that biology can be translated into products and treatment pathways that are reproducible, safe, clinically supported, economically sustainable and accessible across different healthcare systems. By bringing together the individuals responsible for each stage of that transition, the WHO Bacteriophage Community of Practice could help move phage development from fragmented innovation toward a more coherent global strategy.

Applications can be submitted through the official WHO IHS Global Hub membership page. Applicants should select the WHO AMR Community Exchange and, once admitted, locate the Bacteriophage Community of Practice within its groups.

Sources :

WHO IHS Global Hub: Bacteriophage Community of Practice inaugural webinar

WHO IHS Global Hub membership application

WHO fact sheet on bacteriophages and antimicrobial resistance

WHO report: Building the Evidence for the Use of Bacteriophage Therapy