Phages and Their Derived Products as Novel Strategies to Combat Bacterial Infections

Dear Colleagues,

One of the biggest, current threats to public health is the rapid development and spread of multidrug resistance among pathogenic bacteria. As a result, we are approaching a post-antibiotic era, with the number of difficult or impossible-to-treat bacterial infections constantly growing, leading to higher mortality rates and the associated economic burden. The development of new alternative strategies to replace the now ineffective antibiotics has thus become a task of utmost importance for the research community. A recently reborn alternative is phage therapy, initially implemented more than one century ago. Bacterial viruses, phages, able to infect and kill their bacterial hosts, may also serve in the current world in multidimensional applications besides their conventional therapeutic use. Apart from virulent bacterial viruses, phage-derived enzymes can be utilized in antimicrobial (endolyisns) or antivirulent approaches (depolymerases) either as stand-alone therapeutics or in combinations with standard-of-care antibiotics, as well as in diagnostics, making use of the phage-encoded bacterial recognition proteins or domains.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following: clinical use of phages, phage engineering, phage-antibiotic synergy, antimicrobial application of phage-derived proteins, engineering and molecular dissection of phage-derived proteins.

Dr. Agnieszka Latka
Dr. Roberto Vazquez
Guest Editors

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• bacteriophage
• phage therapy
• phage engineering
• phage cocktails
• phage-antibiotic synergy
• phage endolysins
• phage depolymerases
• protein engineering