Viruses against resistant germs: 1.5 million euros for phage research in Braunschweig
HZI researcher Milan Gerovac has won an ERC Starting Grant to study how some phages live permanently inside bacteria – with the aim of developing tools against resistant pathogens.
Archive image · Photo: TeWeBs / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped and resized)
Bacteriophages, or phages for short, are viruses that infect only bacteria. They are seen as a promising option against infections with antibiotic-resistant pathogens. According to the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, more than four million deaths worldwide each year are linked to antimicrobial resistance. HZI junior research group leader Milan Gerovac is now receiving a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant of 1.5 million euros over five years for his phage research, the centre announced on Tuesday.
The PEPHI (Permanent Phage Infections) project focuses on permanent phage infections, in which some phages replicate in step with their host over generations without bursting the bacterium. The team is concentrating on so-called nucleus-forming phages, whose protein shell may be the key to this mode of replication. In the long term, Gerovac said, the team wants to develop hypervirulent phages that do not coexist with bacteria but destroy them directly.
Gerovac has led the research group "Complexes in Phage-Infected Cells" in HZI's MICROSTAR programme since 2024. Before that he was a postdoc at the University of Würzburg and at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI). HZI scientific managing director Josef Penninger called the ERC Starting Grant the highest recognition for early-career researchers in Europe. The work is basic research; it has not yet produced any therapies for patients.