Yorkshire Philosophical Society

Event Information

‘Bacteriophages; the good viruses’.

Professor Martha Clokie, Professor of Microbiology, University of Leicester

Short abstract: In an era of increasing antimicrobial resistance, we desperately need new ways to tackle infectious diseases. Bacteriophage (viruses) are natural bacterial enemies that can be used to treat diseases that are otherwise difficult to treat.

Second of three lectures on the theme: AMR (Antimicrobial resistance) from May to October 2025

7pm in the Tempest Anderson Lecture Theatre in the Yorkshire Museum on Tuesday 3rd June.

Free event for the “York Festival of Ideas”: Non member tickets available from May 2nd:

https://yorkfestivalofideas.com/

Member’s report:

In the second of our 2025 lecture series on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), we turned towards a promising novel approach to treat bacterial infections. Earlier in the year, Prof. Jessica Blair had highlighted the incredible value of antibiotics in modern medicine but also showed us startling data demonstrating that many bacteria are now resistant to these front-line antibiotics. Where might one turn to find other naturally occurring routes to treat infections? As humans we are familiar with the concept of a virus, as we all suffer from these with varying levels of severity. These tiny biological particles carry a small amount of their own genetic material and can infect and replicate within our cells, releasing many offspring to infect more cells in the body and making us sick. In this lecture we heard from Professor Martha Clokie, from the University of Leicester, about a special type of naturally occurring virus that doesn’t infect us but rather infects bacteria. These are called bacteriophage, from the French for bacteria-eaters, and many of them can infect, replicate within and lyse bacteria.

Bacteriophage then sound like a very promising route to stop bacterial infections, and some microbiologists have been thinking along these lines for over 100 years, but the tremendous success of antibiotics removed the need for long-term research into alternatives. In fact, research and application of ‘phage’, as they are commonly known, only continued in Eastern Europe and after the Cold War was seen incorrectly by the Western world as a rather antiquated and limited method.

Professor Clokie, having introduced the background to these bacterial predators, described a clinical case in 2019 where a cocktail of phage was used to treat a patient with a lung infection that antibiotics could not eradicate, thereby saving the life of a patient in a London hospital. While this was a tremendous breakthrough, using phage more systematically is extremely challenging and has problems at many stages including the isolation, testing, manufacture and regulatory landscape of their use. She argued convincingly that a holistic approach to this problem was required to have any chance of bring phage into the UK healthcare system, and this was the unique selling point of the Beyer Mayer Centre for Phage Research that Professor Clokie leads in Leicester, the first centre in the UK dedicated to phage research. One important area the team is studying is the use of phage cocktails. Many chronic bacterial infections, such as lung and wound infections, don’t just contain a single bacterium, and hence, creating and testing cocktails of phage, sometime for use in parallel with existing antibiotics, is what is needed for a treatment to be effective. The Leicester team is also involved in some trials to see if phage can treat common recurrent bladder infections, and a study to see if using phage in chickens, instead of antibiotics, can reduce carriage of disease-causing bacteria in livestock. Professor Clokie has also recently spoken to government about ‘The antimicrobial potential of bacteriophage’, the report of which can be read on the UK Parliament website and hopefully marks the start of some concerted efforts to pursue phage research to provide alternative solutions to the problem of AMR.

Gavin Thomas

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