REPhRAME (REcurrent urinary tract infection: Efficacy and safety of PHage theRapy and Microbiota transfEr) is a Horizon-funded project that tackles the most pressing unmet need in phage therapy research: the generation of robust clinical evidence to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy and safety of phage-based treatment as an intervention against difficult-to-treat and antimicrobial-resistant infections affecting patients across Europe. Existing standard-of-care approaches for recurrent UTI (rUTI) — characterised by repeated cycles of antibiotic prescribing — offer patients only short-term symptomatic relief while simultaneously accelerating the emergence of multidrug-resistant (MDR) uropathogens, progressively narrowing the available therapeutic landscape. To disrupt this self-reinforcing cycle, the REPhRAME consortium will validate a novel phage cocktail and investigate a paradigm-shifting therapeutic strategy: targeted phage therapy designed to eradicate the causative pathogen will be combined with Faecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT), with the dual aim of eliminating infection and restoring the host microbiome's intrinsic resilience, thereby reducing the frequency of recurrence.
