Researchers at the University of Leicester have said they have developed a new technique that will "turbocharge" the use of phages for medical purposes.
The new technique, published in Microbiology Society, uses a rapid, low-cost method for phage development, providing a viable alternative to medicines rendered ineffective by antibiotic resistance.
It allows scientists to sequence phage genomes directly from individual plaques, eliminating the need for large-scale phage purification and expediting genome analysis.
Why this matters
Phage therapy uses viruses, known as bacteriophages, to infect and destroy bacteria.
Unlike antibiotics, which are indiscriminate in their mode of action and often kill beneficial bacteria, phages are highly specific and target only particular strains of bacteria to treat disease in humans and animals.
Thus, the difficulty is often not finding phages but finding and identifying the right ones.
Currently, scientists can isolate many phages from environmental samples and sequence and characterise their genomes to get key information. However, this process is currently slow and expensive and requires large amounts of phage solution to extract purified viral DNA.
As a result, many potentially useful phages are never fully analysed or added to therapeutic libraries.
However, the team of scientists at the University of Leicester's Becky Mayer Centre for Phage Research have now worked out how to sequence phage genomes directly from individual plaques — the small clear zones formed when phages kill bacteria on an agar plate.
The approach combines minimal DNA input with Oxford Nanopore sequencing amplification, enabling rapid and reliable analysis of phage genomes.
Doctor Andrew Millard, co-lead of the University's phage centre, said: "Because the method works from very small amounts of material, it eliminates the need for large-scale phage purification and transforms the speed at which hundreds of genomes can be analysed from months to less than a week."
This pioneering breakthrough means that there is potential to find and understand many more bacteriophages to fight disease and scale up the quantities available and allow us to focus on the best phages.
Professor Martha Clokie, who also leads the University's Becky Mayer Centre for Phage Research, added: "This is a vital step towards making phage therapy a practical reality. Antimicrobial resistance is already responsible for around five million deaths each year globally and without new solutions, this will only increase."
By enabling us to rapidly identify and develop the best phages, this approach brings us much closer to delivering a new class of precision medicines.
The team is now using this approach to build large, fully characterised libraries of bacteriophages, dramatically expanding the number of candidates available to tackle drug-resistant infections.
Ultimately, the team's goal is to bring phage therapies into routine healthcare, providing new, targeted treatments in the global fight against antimicrobial resistance.