NIH awards $2.5M for phage therapy research
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases awarded $2.5 million in grants to 12 institutions to study using bacteriophage therapy to combat antimicrobial-resistant bacteria.
Bacteriophages, or phages, are viruses that target and consume bacteria. They are being used in some cases as a last resort to treat resistant bacterial infections that have not responded to traditional antibiotics.
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“In recent decades, multidrug-resistant bacteria, particularly those that cause potentially deadly diseases like tuberculosis, have become a serious and growing global public health concern,” NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, MD, said in a press release. “With these awards, NIAID is supporting research needed to determine if phage therapy might be used in combination with antibiotics — or replace them altogether — in treating evolving antibiotic-resistant bacterial diseases.”
The NIH said the funding will address knowledge gaps related to phages, including a study characterizing various types of phages, research investigating how phages combat 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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When my husband, Thomas Patterson, was dying from a multidrug-resistant bacterial infection in 2016, I proposed phage therapy to save his life. Few clinicians in the Western world had heard of it, and it was not on NIH’s radar. Researchers donated phage that saved his life, which helped usher in a new era of phage therapy that had been offered only in parts of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe until then. Since Tom’s recovery, dozens of patients have been treated with phage therapy in the United States through the FDA’s compassionate use approval process, several phage therapy programs have launched around the country and the NIAID has funded two clinical trials to evaluate it. The NIAID’s announcement that a dozen new research projects on phage therapy have been funded is welcome news. Translational research is needed to inform efficacy trials on phage therapy, addressing dose, valency, route of administration and to what extent genetic engineering can optimize phage lifestyle. It is extremely gratifying for me and my husband that his case has helped move the needle so it can be examined more rigorously. The global superbug crisis has only worsened under COVID-19, and this research is urgently needed.
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