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

The World Health Organization has formally inaugurated the WHO Bacteriophage Community of Practice, creating a global platform for professionals working across the increasingly diverse bacteriophage ecosystem. Coordinated by the WHO Antimicrobial Resistance Department, the community is hosted within the WHO AMR Community Exchange on the Integrated Health Services Global Hub. Its purpose is to strengthen communication between researchers, clinicians, manufacturers, regulators, public health authorities, policymakers and other stakeholders whose work influences the future development of phage-based interventions. 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 IH...

Uruguay has reported an important advance in the clinical development of bacteriophage therapy in Latin America. The biotechnology company Kinzbio and the Banco de Prótesis, a specialist centre for osteoarticular surgery, used a personalised phage treatment in a 30-year-old patient with a difficult infection associated with a hip prosthesis. According to information published by the Uruguayan newspaper La Diaria, the infection was caused by Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, an uncommon organism in prosthetic joint infections that is naturally resistant to several antimicrobial classes. Conventional diagnostic methods initially failed to identify the bacterium, requiring the medical and biotechnology teams to use metagenomic sequencing before a targeted treatment could be developed. The patient reportedly recovered without adverse effects, and the infection was described as having been eradicated. Kinzbio presents the intervention as the first reported application of its kind within a Latin...

Phage4Crops is a four year COST Action running from 13 October 2026 to 12 October 2030. The official memorandum does not assign a single research budget to the project because COST Actions primarily finance scientific networking rather than laboratory experiments, salaries, equipment or field trials. COST funding typically supports conferences, training schools, Short Term Scientific Missions, interlaboratory exchanges, communication activities and participation grants. Based on standard COST funding levels, the networking budget may be expected to fall in the approximate range of €690,000 over four years, although the final amount can vary depending on participation and annual implementation. Experimental work, including the planned cross country greenhouse and field validation studies, will require additional external funding. Phage4Crops aims to isolate at least 200 phages infecting plant pathogenic bacteria, genetically characterise more than 100 of them, establish a European phage...

Qeen Biotechnologies has announced that it secured C$1 million in growth financing from Investissement Québec to accelerate its expansion across the United Kingdom and Europe. The Québec biotechnology company plans to use the funding to strengthen its international presence, develop new strategic partnerships and increase access to GMP manufactured bacteriophages for clinical research and special access treatments. The announcement reflects one of the most important changes currently taking place in phage therapy. The field is gradually moving beyond isolated academic projects and emergency compassionate treatments toward a more organised pharmaceutical model. Discovering a phage capable of infecting a pathogenic bacterium is only the first step. Before that phage can be administered to a patient, it must be sequenced, biologically characterised, purified, formulated, tested for stability and produced under conditions compatible with clinical use. This manufacturing process is partic...

Phage therapy has spent much of its modern revival suspended between two realities. The first is biological. Bacteriophages can recognise, infect and eliminate bacterial pathogens with a degree of strain level specificity that conventional antibiotics rarely achieve. The second is translational. A phage that produces clear plaques in the laboratory is not automatically a medicine. Between those two realities lies an increasingly complex chain of microbiological qualification, genomic analysis, manufacturing, formulation, clinical decision making, regulation and long term patient monitoring. A new collection launched by npj Viruses places that translational chain at the centre of its scientific scope. Entitled “Phages as antimicrobial therapy”, the collection is currently open for submissions until 30 November 2026 and is edited by Ruby CY Lin, Sabrina Green and Renee Ng. Rather than limiting the discussion to the antibacterial activity of phages, the collection seeks research capable o...