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March 12, 2021
1 min read
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Disclosures: Fauci does not report any relevant financial disclosure.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases awarded $ 2.5 million in grants to 12 institutions to study the use of bacteriophage therapy to combat antimicrobial resistant bacteria.
Bacteriophages, or phages, are viruses that target and consume bacteria. They are used in some cases as a last resort to treat resistant bacterial infections that have not responded to traditional antibiotics.
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“Over the past decades, multidrug-resistant bacteria, especially those that cause life-threatening diseases like tuberculosis, have become a serious and growing global public health problem.” Director of NIAID Anthony S. Fauci, MD, said in a press release. “With these awards, NIAID is supporting the research needed to determine whether phage therapy can be used in combination with antibiotics – or completely replace them – in the treatment of developing antibiotic-resistant bacterial diseases.”
Anthony S. Fauci
The NIH said the funding will help fill knowledge gaps related to phages, including a study characterizing various types of phages, research into how phages fight biofilms, and research to determine how to identify new phages. .
Grant recipients include researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Connecticut, Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, Queens College, Texas A&M Agrilife Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Geneve Foundation, Guild Associates and PhagePro.
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Steffanie Strathdee, PhD
When my husband, Thomas Patterson, died of a multidrug-resistant bacterial infection in 2016, I offered phage therapy to save his life. Few clinicians in the Western world had heard of it, and it wasn’t on the NIH’s radar. Researchers donated phages that saved his life, which helped usher in a new era of phage therapy that had only been offered in parts of the former Soviet Union and Europe. the east until then. Since Tom’s recovery, dozens of patients have been treated with phage therapy in the United States as part of the FDA’s compassionate use approval process, several phage therapy programs have been launched around the country, and NIAID has funded two clinical trials to evaluate it. NIAID’s announcement that a dozen new phage therapy research projects have been funded is good news. Translational research is needed to inform efficacy trials on phage therapy, dose, valence, route of administration, and to what extent genetic engineering can optimize phage lifestyle. It is extremely gratifying to me and my husband that his case has helped move the needle so that it can be examined more rigorously. The global superbug crisis has only worsened under COVID-19, and this research is urgently needed.
Steffanie Strathdee, PhD
Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences
Harold Simon Professor
University of California, San Diego Department of Medicine
Co-director, Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics
Disclosures: Strathdee declares that he owns shares of Adaptive Phage Therapeutics and is an unpaid advisor to Felix Biosciences.
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