Paulo Bispo, PhD, Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, received the Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB) International Research Collaborators Award.
Dr. Bispo is a medical microbiologist dedicated to developing better ways to diagnose, treat, and prevent infections. His research focuses on the use of state-of-the-art molecular genetic and genomic approaches to develop new, rapid, sensitive, and comprehensive diagnostic tests. He also uses a combination of genomic and phenotypic approaches to study the epidemiology of antibiotic-resistant infections and to perform preclinical evaluation of novel anti-infective therapies.
This award will provide $75,000 in funding to Dr. Bispo and his collaborator, Sanna Sillankorva, MS, PhD, a Principal Investigator and Staff Scientist at the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory in Braga, Portugal. Together, they will study the use of bacteriophages (or phages) to treat ocular infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Surveillance studies in the U.S. show increasing and remarkably high levels of resistance among common bacteria that cause ocular infectious diseases, including corneal infections. This has been supplemented by studies from Dr. Bispo's laboratory showing that bacterial corneal infections can sometimes be caused by highly resistant bacteria that are commonly associated with hard-to-treat infections in hospitalized patients.
Phages are viruses that infect bacteria and during the infection can disrupt the bacterial cells, leading to rapid lysis and death. Phages isolated from the environment have been successfully used to treat human infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including cases that are untreatable using antibiotics currently available. Drs. Bispo and Sillankorva have already identified a new phage with potent activity against one type of resistant bacteria isolated from a corneal infection.
They will use this funding to further identify novel phages that are uniquely adapted to infect and kill the two-top causes of antibiotic-resistant corneal infections, and then perform extensive laboratory characterization and testing of these new phages to determine their therapeutic potential. Their long-term goal is to identify a handful of phages that could be successfully used in the future to treat serious and potentially blinding corneal infections caused by bacteria that do not respond well to current antibiotic therapies.
As part of the grant award, Dr. Bispo will spend a period of time working with Dr. Sillankorva in Portugal.