February 10, 2025 at 12:30 pm US EST
Infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria are a major public health threat worldwide, with immunocompromised and critically ill patients being particularly at risk. This crisis of antibiotic resistance has revitalized interest in bacteriophages, which are bacterial viruses, as antibacterials. This practice, termed “phage therapy”, was used extensively around the world from shortly after their discovery in 1917 through the 1940’s. Phage therapy was largely abandoned in Western medicine with the introduction of chemical antibiotics, but the practice has been undergoing a revival in the US and EU thanks to preclinical studies and a number of individual clinical interventions. This talk will cover some principles and history of phage therapy and describe recent advances in this field, including efforts to deploy phages against Acinetobacter baumannii, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Burkholderia cenocepacia. These pathogens are difficult to treat with conventional antibiotics and present challenges for therapeutic phage development, such as high strain diversity and a lack of well-suited phages available from the natural environment. The case of A. baumannii will follow up on the well- publicized human clinical intervention of the Patterson case, in which an emergency treatment with phage was associated with a positive clinical outcome despite the rapid development of phage resistance. The Burkholderia case describes the methodical development of a potentially therapeutic phage, including the elimination of deleterious phage functions and the expansion of host range. These issues are pointing to a need for pre-characterized phage and the use of engineering approaches to develop the raw material of environmental phage isolates into useful therapeutics.
Dr. Gill’s major research focus is the biology and application of bacteriophages, or bacterial
viruses. Research in Dr. Gill’s lab encompasses phage genomics, basic phage biology, and the
applications of phages in real-world settings against multiple human and animal pathogens. This
work is driving the development of bacteriophages and phage-based biotechnology as a new
generation of therapeutic against antibiotic-resistant bacteria and for targeted manipulation of
the microbiome. Dr. Gill is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Animal
Science and serves as a Co-Director of the Center for Phage Technology, an interdisciplinary
research and teaching initiative that is actively participating in applications of bacteriophages in
human medicine. As a part of this role, Dr. Gill has lead the development of computational tools
for phage genome annotation, which are available to the public via the popular Galaxy
infrastructure; these tools are also used for instruction in a one-of-a-kind high-impact
undergraduate course on phage genomics. In addition to his appointment in Animal Science,
Dr. Gill holds joint appointments with the Faculty of Genetics and the Department of Microbial
Pathogenesis and Immunology in the College of Medicine.