Principal Investigator:  Gerlinde Van de Walle

Co-PI: Daryl Nydam, Anja Sipka

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): 

Antibiotics (Abx) are widely used to treat bacterial infections in the agriculture sector. However, Abx overuse can lead to antimicrobial resistance, which is recognized as a potential health threat to humans and animals and leads to public concern. Moreover, the growing organic livestock sector prohibits the use of Abx in animals used to produce organic food. Finally, while conventional Abx can eliminate bacteria, these products are incapable of restoring the tissue damage caused by the pathogen. Consequently, there is a need for innovative approaches that are capable of simultaneously fighting bacterial infections and restoring the infection-mediated tissue damage. The overall innovation lies in the use of the stem cell repertoire of secreted biomolecules with antimicrobial and regenerative properties to provide a novel platform technology for the treatment of infectious diseases in agricultural animals that will reduce reliance on Abx while simultaneously enhancing tissue regeneration. No such approaches currently exist in the food animal production industry, including the organic livestock sector. We recently published on the antimicrobial and regenerative properties of the secretome from bovine mammary stem/progenitor cells (MaSC) in vitro, and propose to study in depth the MaSC secretome as a novel biological in the context of mastitis, as proof-of-concept.