The Phage Therapy Antipersister strategy (PHAGES-AntiPERS) consortium is a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, microbiologists, and bioinformaticians who will develop new innovative therapies to combat chronic infections caused by bacterial persister cells.

PHAGES-AntiPERS is supported by funding from the Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance (JPIAMR).

Antimicrobial resistance is a major global threat to health, reducing our ability to treat or prevent disease. It arises when strains of bacteria develop and spread new ways to escape the actions of antibiotics used to control them. This makes common infections harder, if not impossible to treat, especially when bacteria become resistant to multiple antimicrobials.

To address this, scientists have been looking at other ways to control bacteria, and one that has great promise comes from looking at the natural predators of bacteria, bacteriophages. These are viruses that infect bacterial cells in order to replicate themselves, which kills of the bacteria. Phage therapy aims to harness this natural ability to attack and destroy pathogenic bacteria that cause disease in humans without affecting our own bodies’ cells.

Despite the promise of this extra line of attack, there are certain antimicrobial resistant bacterial strains where cells persist even after phage therapy. These bacterial “persisters” are the target of the PHAGES-AntiPERS consortium, which is being coordinated by Dr. Maria Tomas coordinator of the Traslational and Multidisciplinar Microbiology research group (MicroTM) from the Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de A Coruña (INIBIC) in Spain.

The consortium will develop and test new therapies against persistent members of a group of bacteria deemed as critical pathogens by the World Health Organisation due to their extensive resistance to antibiotics.

The project will establish a biobank of strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii and Pseudomonas aeruginosa that are prone to establishing persistent infections, as well as a phage bank that targets these persisters, which will support future work in this area.

The team brings together a variety of expertise to understand the nature of this persistence and then design anti-persister strategies that combine antimicrobial agents with phages, phage-derived enzymes and other antimicorbial compounds. They will then test these not just in the laboratory, but also in organisms to assess their effectiveness.

Within the project, Dr Adriaenssens and her team in the Quadram Institute will investigate the genomic basis of persister development and successful treatment, as well as the interactions with the rest of the microbiome.

“I’m delighted to start this new collaboration on the use of bacteriophages in combination with other compounds to tackle chronic infections. Being able to combine our passion for bacteriophages with our expertise in genomics and microbiome science is very exciting for our team and will greatly increase our understanding of how bacteriophages can be successfully used in treatment of chronic infections,” said Dr Evelien Adriaenssens.

PHAGES-AntiPERS is one of thirteen projects recommended for funding within the Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance (JPIAMR) 17th transnational call: Interventions moving forward to promote action to counteract the emergence and spread of bacterial and fungal resistance and to improve treatments. The call was within the framework of the ERA‐NET JPIAMR-ACTION and the total funding amount is 17,2 M€.