Editorial: Emerging Trends in Phage Therapeutics to Overcome Antibiotic Resistance

Abstract

minimize safety concerns by excluding undesirable genetic elements and improving standardization (Kakkar et al., 2024;Banerjee et al., 2025). Collectively, these developments are accelerating the translation of antibacterial interventions toward more personalized and targeted approaches. This Research Topic highlights advances in phage therapeutics across engineered approaches, clinical translation, microbiome-informed evaluation, and enabling infrastructure for therapeutic deployment. Wiese et al. describe that high-throughput screening in-vitro platform ("i-screen") that evaluates phage activity against Clostridium perfringens within a complex chicken cecal microbiota, moving beyond simplified monoculture assays. In this microbiome-informed setting, a C. perfringens-specific phage suppressed pathogen growth with performance comparable to antibiotic benchmarks, while preserving microbiota structure more effectively and showing clear host specificity. The study provides a practical framework to prioritize candidate phages under ecologically relevant conditions, with implications for animal health and food production systems. Finally, Topa-Pila et al. highlight phage biobanks as enabling infrastructure for precision phage deployment in the AMR era. They argue that scalable therapeutic implementation requires curated collections supported by standardized genomic and functional characterization, harmonized metadata, and interoperable workflows that accelerate phage-host matching. By positioning biobanks as decision-support systems within a One Health perspective, the paper emphasizes that governance, standardization, and data harmonization are essential requirements for coordinated clinical, veterinary, agricultural, and environmental applications.While the promise of phage therapy is undeniable, its practical adoption necessitates addressing several challenges, including the optimization of phage cocktails for consistent and durable efficacy, clearer regulatory pathways, and scalable manufacturing with robust quality control (Morales and Hyman, 2024). In parallel, important knowledge gaps remain regarding phage-host dynamics in complex communities, the determinants of treatment success across different infection sites, and the evolutionary trajectories that shape both bacterial and phage resistance. Because genomics is increasingly central to phage discovery, characterization, and monitoring, it is also essential to recognize that methodological choices can introduce biases in phage sequencing and downstream interpretation, potentially limiting reproducibility and comparability across studies (Mora-Domí nguez and Calero-Ca ceres, 2025). Addressing these limitations will require harmonized protocols, transparent reporting standards, and standardized bioinformatic pipelines that support interoperable datasets and translation-ready evidence.In conclusion, we hope this special issue reinforces phage therapeutics as a rapidly advancing and increasingly practical complement to antibiotics in the response to antimicrobial resistance. By bringing together studies spanning engineered phageantimicrobial strategies, clinical implementation in complex infections, microbiomeinformed evaluation platforms, and the development of phage biobanks as enabling infrastructure, this collection highlights key directions shaping the field. Moving these advances toward broader uptake will require coordinated efforts to strengthen evidence generation and comparability, including standardized characterization frameworks, interoperable biobanking systems, and shared analytical workflows that support reliable phage-host matching across settings. Ultimately, global collaboration, interdisciplinary research, and innovation-driven translation will be essential to realize the full potential of phage-based interventions and to position them as a robust component of future AMR mitigation strategies.