Grant: Canada-UK Partnership on Antibiotic Resistance - LOI

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the world's most urgent public health problems. The worldwide use and misuse of antimicrobials in medicine and agriculture has resulted in the selection of bacteria resistant to the activity of these chemical compounds. Recently, there has been a rapid and significant increase in the frequency of Gram-negative extreme drug-resistant (XDR) bacteria. With the paucity of new antimicrobial drug development currently, there is renewed interest in the use of novel therapeutics such as phage therapy, alone or in combination with traditional treatments. Recent rigorous experimental data has demonstrated phage therapy can be used as a viable alternative or complement to antibiotic therapy for bacterial infections. From a clinical standpoint, phage administration in vivo is innocuous and no complications associated with their use have been reported. The concept that phage therapy is a realistic treatment alternative is becoming more widely accepted. We propose to develop Phage Therapy as an alternative medicine for the control or elimination of infections caused by pathogenic XDR Gram-negative bacteria. This will lead to the potential treatment of bacterial diseases and will be especially useful in instances where bacteria exhibit extremely high levels of antibiotic resistance, that are untreatable using conventional therapeutic agents.