Photo By Elliott Page | FREDERICK, Md. (April 11, 2025) Researchers with Naval Medical Research Command (NMRC)...... read more read more
The landscape of bacterial health threats is ever evolving and poses a significant risk to the readiness of the U.S. military, whose members are frequently exposed to bacteria through combat injuries and deployments to overseas locations.
Navy Medicine Research & Development (NMR&D) is engaged in bacteriophage therapy research to protect the warfighter from these threats, keeping U.S. forces ready and lethal.
Starting in fiscal year 2019, and over the course of a six-year funding period awarded by Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP), NMR&D fulfilled major priorities in research focusing on bacteriophages (or phages), viruses that target and kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Naval Medical Research Command (NMRC) worked alongside U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), sharing research efforts in protecting the service member population. NMRC’s headquarters and WRAIR are co-located, creating a seamless, collaborative environment for those shared efforts.
“The greatest accomplishment [during this funding period] has been bringing the full capabilities of researchers across Navy Medicine Research & Development jointly alongside Army Medicine R&D to accelerate advancements in this technology,” said Cmdr. Mark Simons, director of NMRC’s Infectious Diseases Directorate. “When harnessed and focused on top priorities, Navy Medicine and DoD researchers have incredible multidisciplinary capabilities to advance medical technologies in support of warfighter medical gaps.”
Phage cocktails can contain various combinations of phages, designed to attack specific bacteria. The four bacterial pathogens targeted during this research period were Acinetobacter baumannii, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus, all of which can cause fevers, fatigue and swelling. In the absence of a phage cocktail (specifically, one that has been made ready through purification and sequencing), there are no targeted approaches for combating certain bacterial pathogens. Antibiotics can kill all varieties of bacteria in the body, both good and bad, unlike phages, which can be targeted to only kill harmful bacteria.
NMRC’s pillar objectives during this award were to establish processes and technologies to develop bacteriophage cocktails for treatment of bacterial infections, and to develop fully-characterized products that will be the foundation for advancement into human clinical trials and eventual Food and Drug Administration (FDA) licensure.
A fully-developed phage cocktail for patient treatment could allow medical professionals to precisely treat service members who are exposed to multidrug-resistant bacteria. This capability, depending on the type of bacterial infection, would allow infected service members to be treated intravenously, topically or both, to more rapidly restore combat strength and return to their missions on behalf of the U.S.
“We collect these phages, purify them and grow them in large quantities,” explained Dr. Biswajit Biswas, chief of NMRC’s Bacteriophage Science Division. “Then, we extract DNA, sequence its genome and analyze the phage very carefully to understand if it carries any toxins, since we cannot push something in the human systems if the phage carries toxins.”
Currently, NMRC’s labs have developed approximately 2,500 phage cocktails. Phages are one of the most abundant biological substance on earth, even outnumbering bacteria. Strung together, all of the phages on earth could encircle the Milky Way Galaxy three times. The effort to amass a library of over 2,000 phages is one that NMRC, fellow NMR&D commands and partner nations take on proudly, as this collection can be used for years to come to support development of novel treatments for infections.
One of eight NMR&D commands, Naval Medical Research Unit (NAMRU) SOUTH, which conducts research on infectious diseases in South America, was the primary partner and supplier of phage isolates for the phage collection effort in this research period.
"As part of our Antimicrobial Resistance research surveillance efforts, NAMRU SOUTH has a unique and expanding repository of clinically relevant multidrug resistant bacterial samples,” said Dr. Henju Marjuki, chief science officer with NAMRU SOUTH.
“These locally-collected strains are ideal candidates for identifying diverse new phages that could change clinical outcomes for hard-to-treat organisms,” continued Marjuki. “These phages and their host strains have been previously sent to NMRC to be included in the development of a large globally-sourced library of phages that could eventually be used for personalized therapeutic cocktails, consisting of a mixture of different bacteriophages aimed at various bacterial species.”
The collection of phage particles can be an intricate process. Collection efforts span the globe, with phages collected from wastewater (bogs, sewers, rivers, etc.) and put through several rounds of purification and characterization before being developed into therapeutic cocktails, ensuring the phage is safe and effective for use.
NMRC’s phage library also includes phages from WRAIR collected in Thailand, Kenya, and Georgia.
“WRAIR’s Forward Labs coordinated very closely with the WRAIR Wound Infections Department to harvest new bacteriophages on four continents,” said Dr. Mikeljon Nikolich, chief of Bacteriophage Therapeutics with WRAIR. “This network was a key engine in the Army-Navy collaborative effort to develop phage cocktails against multidrug-resistant infections.
NMRC has a record of success in treating illness with bacteriophage therapy resulting from their research and phage library. In 2015, Tom Patterson, a doctor who fell critically ill from Acinetobacter baumannii (nicknamed Iraqibacter from the early days of the Iraq war where infected soldiers would fall ill from the bacteria), fell into a coma, and remained ill through multiple treatments, until he was administered an NMRC developed cocktail intravenously. “This is important,” Biswas said. “It should be understood that before Tom Patterson’s case, nobody used phage to treat systemic bacterial infection in the United States.
Patterson’s successful treatment set the stage for what NMRC hopes to accomplish with phage therapy research—administering phage to humans as an FDA-approved medicine.
“NRMC’s next focus for phage research is Investigational New Drug applications with the FDA, to move the most promising cocktails into phase one safety and immune response studies,” said Simons. “There is still work to do to support the application and manufacturing standardization for an early human study with these new phage cocktail prototypes."
Leading research efforts in bacteriophage research on behalf of the warfighter is part of the U.S. Navy’s mission to support the DoD in peacetime and wartime.
“It is important that the Navy lead the charge in phage therapy research,” Simons explained. “Navy and Marine Corps warfighters are often first to the fight as expeditionary units, and thus will experience early casualties in a potentially prolonged-care setting. This will require novel antimicrobial countermeasures to be used early and throughout the continuum of care to treat antibiotic-resistant infections which are rising globally and highly prevalent in developing countries and high-conflict regions.”
The impact of bacteriophage therapy research to the military population cannot be understated.
“Navy Medicine R&D is a leader in bacteriophage research so that we can bring this promising technology to clinicians and corpsman to improve battlefield survival for Sailors and Marines,” Simons added.
The phage libraries, processes, technologies, evaluation pipelines and expertise gained throughout the course of the CDRMP award effort will inform the DoD’s Bacteriophage R&D program as NMRC and WRAIR continue to jointly advance the technology and treatment of deployed military service members.
For 250 years, Navy Medicine, represented by more than 44,000 highly-trained military and civilian healthcare professionals, has delivered quality healthcare and enduring expeditionary medical support to the warfighter on, below, and above the sea and ashore.
NMR&D, a global collective of eight commands, conducts research in support of Navy, Marine Corps and joint U.S. warfighter health, readiness and lethality, across a broad spectrum of activity from basic science in the laboratory to field studies in austere and remote areas of the world to investigations in operational environments. NMR&D studies infectious diseases, biological warfare detection and defense, combat casualty care, environmental health concerns, directed energy health effects, aerospace and undersea medicine, medical modeling, simulation, operational mission support, epidemiology and behavioral sciences.
NMRC, headquarters of Navy Medicine Research & Development, is engaged in a broad spectrum of activity from basic science in the laboratory to field studies in austere and remote areas of the world to investigations in operational environments. In support of Navy, Marine Corps and joint U.S. warfighter health, readiness and lethality, researchers study infectious diseases, biological warfare detection and defense, combat casualty care, environmental health concerns, aerospace and undersea medicine, operational mission support and epidemiology.
| Date Taken: | 06.06.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 06.06.2025 15:19 |
| Story ID: | 499886 |
| Location: | SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND, US |
| Web Views: | 30 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, NMR&D Reaches Milestones in Six Year CDRMP Focused Program Award for Bacteriophage Therapy, by Elliott Page, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
