GW4 BioMed2 Doctoral Training Partnership brings together the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff (lead), and Exeter to develop the next generation of biomedical researchers. This project will pioneer an Escherichia coli-based cell-free system to generate modified Pseudomonas aeruginosa phages with enhanced therapeutic properties, building on advanced phage production workflows and cell-free systems. This project will develop next-generation phage therapies that target and kill these bacteria, overcoming conventional antibiotic resistance.
The main objectives of this project are to establish an E. coli cell-free phage production system, engineer phage genomes to encode counter-defence systems and antimicrobial payloads, tailor phage epigenomes to bypass restriction-modification defences, validate engineered phages against clinically relevant P. aeruginosa strains, evaluate the infectivity, replication kinetics, and bactericidal activity of modified phages in vitro against an international panel of clinical isolates of P. aeruginosa, and compare their performance to unmodified controls through this research.
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