£800,000 BBSRC Funding Advances Phage-Based Salmonella Prevention in Poultry
Researchers at the University of Leicester have received £800,000 from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council to advance a bacteriophage product designed to prevent Salmonella infection in chickens. The new programme will move an already tested phage-based intervention further toward practical use in poultry production by expanding its activity against emerging and multidrug-resistant bacterial strains, investigating its effects on the poultry microbiome and generating evidence needed for future deployment in real farming environments.
The project is led by Professor Martha Clokie and Dr Anisha Thanki at the University of Leicester’s Becky Mayer Centre for Phage Research and involves collaborators from the University of Nottingham, the University of Surrey and Carus Animal Health. The new funding therefore brings together phage microbiology, veterinary science and commercial animal-health development around a single translational objective: reducing Salmonella carriage in poultry before contaminated bacteria can move further through the food chain.
Salmonella remains one of the most important bacterial foodborne pathogens worldwide. Poultry and eggs are among the reservoirs through which non-typhoidal Salmonella can reach humans, while infection within poultry flocks can persist without producing obvious clinical disease in every animal. This makes control particularly difficult because apparently healthy birds may still carry and shed bacteria capable of contaminating their environment, other animals or food products.
Conventional control therefore depends on multiple interventions, including farm biosecurity, hygiene, vaccination, surveillance and antimicrobial treatment where appropriate. Bacteriophages offer a different approach because they can selectively infect susceptible bacterial cells without broadly eliminating unrelated members of the microbiota. In livestock production, they could potentially be administered before infection becomes established or used to reduce bacterial colonization during the period in which animals are being raised.
The Leicester programme has already progressed beyond initial phage isolation. Clokie and Thanki’s team previously developed a phage product capable of preventing Salmonella infection in experimentally challenged broiler chickens. Earlier BBSRC-supported work also addressed one of the less visible but critical barriers to translating phage research into an actual veterinary product: manufacturing.
Producing enough phage for a laboratory experiment is fundamentally different from producing a reproducible biological preparation for use across commercial poultry populations. Phages must be amplified against suitable bacterial hosts, purified, concentrated, formulated and stored while maintaining biological activity and minimizing unwanted bacterial contaminants. Processes that work efficiently at millilitre scale can behave differently when expanded by several orders of magnitude.
The Leicester team reports that previous work successfully moved production from millilitre volumes to litre-scale manufacturing. This development is important because a phage intervention intended for agriculture must ultimately be compatible with treatment of large numbers of animals and cannot depend on highly individualized laboratory preparation.
The new £800,000 award shifts the focus further toward product validation. Researchers will test the phage preparation against a broader collection of Salmonella strains, including emerging variants and isolates showing multidrug resistance. This is essential because a phage product that performs well against a small laboratory collection may not necessarily provide adequate coverage against the genetically diverse bacterial populations circulating in commercial poultry systems.
Phage specificity is simultaneously one of the technology’s principal advantages and one of its main development challenges. The ability of a bacteriophage to kill one Salmonella strain does not guarantee equal activity against another, even when both bacteria belong to the same species or serovar. Differences in surface receptors, capsules, lipopolysaccharides and intracellular defence systems can alter susceptibility to infection.
A practical poultry product therefore requires sufficiently broad and stable activity against the bacterial strains it is expected to encounter. Phage cocktails can help address this problem by combining viruses with different host ranges or receptor targets, increasing the probability that at least one component will infect a given bacterial isolate and potentially reducing the probability that resistance to a single phage will compromise the entire treatment.
Leicester’s previous experimental work provides an important foundation for this strategy. In a 2023 study published in Emerging Microbes & Infections, Thanki and colleagues evaluated a bacteriophage cocktail administered in feed to broiler chickens experimentally challenged with Salmonella. The study included 672 birds distributed across different treatment and control groups and examined multiple phage doses. The researchers reported significant reductions in Salmonella colonization following phage administration, demonstrating that a feed-delivered cocktail could remain sufficiently active to influence bacterial carriage within animals rather than only under laboratory conditions.
This type of administration is particularly relevant for agricultural translation. Any intervention intended for routine poultry production needs to fit within existing husbandry practices wherever possible. A product that can be incorporated into feed or another scalable delivery system may be easier to deploy across large flocks than one requiring individual treatment of every bird.
The Leicester group has also continued testing phages in other parts of poultry production. A 2026 study in Poultry Science reported that phage treatment significantly reduced Salmonella shedding in layer hens and reduced the abundance of the bacterium detected on the surface of eggs produced by treated birds. Although individual studies use specific experimental conditions and cannot by themselves establish universal field efficacy, the findings strengthen the evidence that phage-based prevention may be useful at several points within poultry production.
The new BBSRC programme will address an additional question that is becoming increasingly important in antimicrobial development: what happens to the rest of the microbiome when the target pathogen is removed?
Broad-spectrum antibiotics can disturb many bacterial populations beyond the organism responsible for disease. Bacteriophages are generally much more specific, creating the possibility of suppressing Salmonella while preserving larger portions of the normal intestinal microbial community. However, specificity does not mean that ecological consequences can simply be assumed to be negligible.
Removing or reducing one bacterial population can indirectly change competition, nutrient availability and microbial interactions within the gut. The new Leicester project will therefore examine the effect of the phage product on the poultry microbiome rather than evaluating Salmonella counts alone. Demonstrating limited disruption would support one of the proposed advantages of targeted phage interventions, while any unexpected changes would need to be understood before widespread agricultural use.
The participation of Dr Robert Atterbury at the University of Nottingham and Professor Roberto La Ragione and Dr Jai Mehat at the University of Surrey adds substantial veterinary and poultry-infection expertise to the programme. Carus Animal Health provides an industrial partner focused on translating veterinary innovations into products, helping bridge the gap between university research and the manufacturing, regulatory and commercial requirements associated with animal-health interventions.
This translational component is important because successful experimental phage therapy does not automatically become a usable agricultural product. Developers must establish manufacturing specifications, stability, formulation, dosing, safety, efficacy across relevant pathogen populations and compatibility with real production systems. Regulatory requirements for veterinary biological products and feed-associated interventions must also be addressed before commercial deployment.
The new award therefore represents a development programme rather than a commercial authorization. The University of Leicester describes the goal as bringing the phage product closer to market, not announcing that it is already approved for routine farm use. The planned experiments will generate additional evidence needed to determine whether the intervention can progress toward broader field testing and eventual commercial development.
Antimicrobial resistance provides another reason for pursuing this work. Multidrug-resistant Salmonella strains complicate treatment in both veterinary and human medicine, while antibiotic use throughout agriculture remains part of the wider One Health discussion surrounding antimicrobial selection pressure. A targeted preventive intervention capable of reducing bacterial carriage before disease develops or before contaminated products enter the food chain could potentially reduce reliance on antibiotics in some circumstances.
The significance of this strategy extends beyond protecting individual chickens. Foodborne pathogen control operates across the entire production chain, and reducing the bacterial burden at the animal stage could potentially decrease opportunities for contamination during processing and distribution. The Leicester team explicitly frames its objective around preventing Salmonella before it reaches the food chain, making the programme as much a food-safety project as a veterinary phage-therapy project.
Phage therapy in agriculture also differs from its use in human medicine in several important ways. Human personalized phage therapy may involve selecting individual phages against a bacterial isolate from a particular patient. A commercial poultry intervention instead needs to function across large populations of animals exposed to diverse bacterial strains, often without performing a personalized phagogram for every infection.
That changes the design requirements. Agricultural products generally need broad-enough strain coverage, inexpensive and scalable manufacturing, simple administration and sufficient stability under conditions encountered during transport, storage and use. The economics of treating thousands of animals also differ considerably from those of producing a specialized therapy for an individual patient.
The Leicester programme is therefore valuable as an example of phage translation outside human compassionate therapy. It addresses not only whether phages can kill Salmonella, but whether a defined preparation can be manufactured at scale, administered practically, remain active against contemporary bacterial populations and interact acceptably with the complex microbiome of the animals receiving it.
The work also illustrates the increasingly broad scope of the Becky Mayer Centre for Phage Research. Clokie and colleagues are involved in phage research spanning veterinary applications, human infection and fundamental phage biology, while this particular programme demonstrates how knowledge generated through bacteriophage research can be translated into an intervention aimed at food production and public health.
Several scientific questions remain before the product can move toward widespread use. Researchers will need to determine whether efficacy remains consistent across circulating Salmonella strains, whether phage-resistant bacterial variants emerge during repeated exposure, how long the treatment remains effective within the gastrointestinal tract and whether the composition of the microbiome influences the response.
Field conditions will also introduce variables that controlled experimental trials cannot fully reproduce. Commercial poultry populations differ in genetics, diet, housing conditions, bacterial exposure and microbiome composition. A preparation that performs consistently in controlled challenge studies must eventually demonstrate that its benefits can be maintained across those more heterogeneous environments.
The new BBSRC funding is intended to narrow that translational gap. By combining testing against emerging and multidrug-resistant Salmonella, microbiome analysis, manufacturing experience and veterinary expertise, the programme moves the technology beyond the question of whether phages can reduce bacterial colonization and toward the more difficult question of whether they can become a reliable product for routine animal health and food-safety applications.
The project should therefore not be interpreted as evidence that phages are ready to replace established Salmonella control programmes in poultry. Vaccination, hygiene, surveillance and other interventions remain central to food safety, and any future phage product would most likely become another component within a broader control strategy.
Its importance lies instead in the stage of development now being reached. Leicester researchers already have experimental evidence of activity in poultry and experience scaling phage production from laboratory to litre volumes. The next phase will determine whether that foundation can support a product with sufficient strain coverage, safety, microbiome compatibility and practical performance to move closer to deployment on farms.
If those objectives are achieved, the programme could provide a useful model for translating bacteriophages into preventive veterinary tools: identifying effective phages is only the beginning, while manufacturing, ecological effects, delivery and performance against the bacterial diversity encountered outside the laboratory ultimately determine whether an experimental therapy can become a practical antimicrobial product.
Sources :
University of Leicester — “Funding boost to tackle Salmonella in chickens with ‘bacteriophage therapy’,” 29 September 2026. The announcement confirms the £800,000 BBSRC award, the Leicester, Nottingham, Surrey and Carus Animal Health collaboration, testing against emerging and multidrug-resistant Salmonella, microbiome studies and previous scale-up from millilitres to litres. University of Leicester
https://le.ac.uk/news/2026/september/salmonella-bacteriophage-therapy-leicester
Thanki AM, Hooton S, Whenham N et al. — “A bacteriophage cocktail delivered in feed significantly reduced Salmonella colonization in challenged broiler chickens.” Emerging Microbes & Infections 12 (2023): 2217947. PubMed
https://doi.org/10.1080/22221751.2023.2217947
Thanki AM, Whenham N, Dale T et al. — “Phage treatment significantly reduces Salmonella shedding in layer hens and Salmonella abundance on the surface of the eggs they produce.” Poultry Science 105 (2026): 106416. PubMed
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psj.2026.106416
UK Research and Innovation — Gateway to Research, “Overcoming hurdles to translate phage research,” BBSRC award to the University of Leicester and Martha Clokie. GtR
https://gtr.ukri.org/
University of Leicester — Earlier BBSRC-supported work on scaling phage production toward commercial veterinary use. University of Leicester
https://le.ac.uk/news/2023/october/phage
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