The increasing prevalence of multidrug-resistant bacteria is creating an urgent need for alternative strategies to conventional antibiotics. Bacteriophages are viruses that specifically infect bacteria and are increasingly being investigated as potential therapeutic agents against difficult-to-treat bacterial infections. In this project, the student will evaluate a collection of bacteriophages against clinically relevant multidrug-resistant bacterial isolates, including ESKAPE pathogens. The main objective will be to determine the activity and host range of selected bacteriophages and to identify bacterial isolates that are susceptible or resistant to individual phages. The experimental work may include bacteriophage propagation and titration, host-range screening, efficiency-of-plating assays and bacterial killing experiments. The student may also investigate combinations of bacteriophages with clinically relevant antibiotics to determine whether combined treatment improves bacterial killing, prevents bacterial regrowth or reduces the emergence of resistant populations. Depending on the scope of the project, additional experiments may examine bacteriophage activity against bacterial biofilms or characterise bacterial populations that develop resistance following phage exposure. The project provides hands-on experience in bacteriology, antimicrobial resistance and bacteriophage research and introduces experimental approaches for evaluating bacteriophages as potential antimicrobial treatments.
Keywords: bacteriophages, phage therapy, antimicrobial resistance, ESKAPE pathogens, phage-antibiotic combinations
Interested? Please drop me an e-mail for more information!
Kristian Riesbeck – Professor, MD, PhD
Clinical Microbiology, Dept. of Translational Medicine, Lund University
Wallenberg laboratory
Inga Marie Nilssons gata 53
SE-214 28 Malmö, Sweden
http://research.med.lu.se/kristian-riesbeck
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6274-6965