Sponsor: Kent SeaTech Corporation

• Project duration: 10/1/2004 - 9/30/2027
• Total project (est.): $2,612,263
• Requested ATP funds: $1,999,380

Aquaculture provides nearly one-third of the world's seafood supplies and is the fastest growing agricultural sector in the United States, a $5.6 billion industry employing nearly 200,000 people. But the growth - and even survival - of our aquaculture industry is threatened by uncontrolled bacterial diseases that cause extensive losses and directly affect the ability of U.S. producers to compete with foreign products. Bacterial pathogens are responsible for the majority of aquatic diseases plaguing aquaculture. Global economic losses caused by infectious aquaculture diseases amount to more than $3 billion annually. Foreign producers have dozens of low-cost, unregulated drugs available for disease management, but in the U.S., only two antibiotics have been approved for aquaculture use. Due to the rapid, worldwide emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens in human medicine, agriculture and aquaculture, regulators are severely limiting antibiotic use in the U.S. Even the future use of the two drugs approved for use in aquaculture is in doubt. Rather than relying on antibiotics, Kent SeaTech, a U.S. aquaculture company, proposes a radically new approach - using bacteriophages and bacteriophage products to target and kill pathogenic bacteria. Bacteriophages or phages are naturally occurring viruses that infect and kill bacteria. They have several attractive features for use as therapeutics. For example, phages are usually highly specific to a single species or even strain of bacteria. This selectivity could present a tremendous advantage over the use of traditional antibiotics that are more widespread in their activity and sometimes stimulate the development of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. Also, since phages are naturally occurring and very abundant, there may be substantially fewer problems involved in obtaining regulatory approval for their use. Kent SeaTech, working with several university and industry collaborators, proposes to utilize modern molecular biology techniques to develop new methods for preventing and treating aquaculture bacterial diseases using phages and the anti-bacterial enzymes that they produce. The project will have to overcome several major barriers, including identifying and isolating the proper phages to treat specific aquatic diseases, minimizing the potential for bacteria to mutate and become resistant to phages, developing effective delivery systems, and a general lack of detailed information on natural phages and their biological mechanisms. Phages and phage lysins - the proteins that phages use to effectively kill bacteria by destroying bacterial cell walls - will be explored for treating extracellular and intracellular pathogenic bacteria, but the latter will require the development of novel delivery systems to introduce the proteins into fish cells. Because of the large number of unknowns and high technical risk, ATP support is needed to pursue this work. The funding will allow Kent SeaTech, a small company, to develop a broad collaborative effort with several universities, including the University of California at San Diego, San Diego State University, the University of Massachusetts Medical School (Worcester, Mass.) and Oregon State University (Corvallis, Ore.). If successful, the project would establish an entirely new class of inexpensive, highly specific antibacterial therapies that could target bacterial diseases in a variety of aquaculture and agriculture applications.

For project information:

James M. Carlberg, (858) 452-5765
jcarlberg@kentseatech.com

ATP Project Manager

Mrunal Chapekar, 301-975-6846
mrunal.chapekar@nist.gov

This is the fact sheet for this project as it was announced on September 28, 2004.
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