ROSETTA

Project Rosetta employs a completely novel approach of combining biological, genomic, social sciences, and historic expertise to map, translate, and revive the vast microbial and written archives created by bacteriophage-typing and parallel antibacterial therapy efforts since the 1940s. Situated at the boundary between history and biology, our unique interdisciplinary team will add hundreds of thousands of historical datapoints on microbial prevalence and traits to existing phylogenetic research, vastly increase our understanding of the biological and social pressures shaping microbial evolution in the 20th century, and revive promising forgotten antibacterial therapies in an age of failing antibiotics. Since their co-discovery in 1917, bacteriophages (phages) – viruses that infect bacteria – have been used to treat pathogens, unravel bacterial genetics, and study global microbial diversity via phage-typing (using phages to reliably identify and differentiate between bacterial strains). Stored in archives, libraries, and culture collections around the world, analogue meta data and microbial samples provide unique insight into our planet’s microbial past and may well hold therapeutic solutions to one of the 21 century’s major health challenges – antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Project Rosetta brings together a unique international team of leading microbial virologists, historians, public health scientists and clinicians to engage in a new kind of interdisciplinary research at the frontier between the medical humanities and sciences. The project has four interrelated core aims: (1) translate over 50 years of phage-based data on microbial prevalence for the genomic age to build a Rosetta dictionary; (2) create a pioneering interdisciplinary database on global microbial diversity and the biological and human factors driving microbial evolution in the 20th century, with a focus on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and phage defence mechanisms; (3) search the historical records and dataset on phage therapy to inform the next-generation phage therapies in the face of surging AMR; (4) study and pinpoint the regulatory, economic and scientific obstacles facing phage therapy in the 21st century. By unlocking microbial and written cultural archives in a way that no discipline could do by itself, Project Rosetta will a) pioneer a new way of fusing cutting-edge biomedical research with critical historiographic methodology, b) dramatically expand knowledge of our microbial past, c) look back to look forward when it comes to using bacteriophages against surging AMR.