Antonia Sagona

In my lab, we are interested in understanding the mechanisms of bacterial infection and phage therapy inside the mammalian cell environment. Bacteriophages or phages are viruses that have great specificity towards targeting their host bacteria and thus can be used as therapeutics to tackle bacterial infections, what we define as phage therapy. The interest in phage therapy has grown increasingly over the past decade, due to the emerging problem of antibiotic resistance in many bacterial pathogens. A major challenge to patient safety is the hospital infections due to gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria resistant to antibiotics. One of the possible solutions to this problem is the use of bacteriophages as antimicrobial agents. Bacteriophages are safe for humans and present high specificity to their bacterial target, while having minimal side effects. However, there are still concerns for phage therapy, over the potential for immune responses, rapid toxin release by the lytic action of phages and difficulty of dose determination in clinical situations. Additionally, there is little knowledge of the cell biology behind phage therapy due to the challenges in the field and that is an obstacle in the rapid progress of phage therapy. We try in the lab to address all these concerns and achieve a better understanding of how phages interact with bacteria in human cell environment. We are also interested in the development of new methods that will enable bacteriophages to be used as reliable diagnostics of bacterial infection.