EFRI-EPSRC "ENG-EPSRC EFRI ELiS: Developing probiotic interventions to reduce the emergence and persistence of pathogens in built environments"

The project 'ENG-EPSRC EFRI ELiS: Developing probiotic interventions to reduce the emergence and persistence of pathogens in built environments' is an international, multidisciplinary research project that addresses contemporary agendas towards designing and buildings healthy built environments. The project brings together expertise in microbiology, the built environment, infectious disease and antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

The proposal responds to the urgency for improving the health of our built environments using an approach that departs from the modern understanding that healthy environments should be based on fewer microbes. Urbanisation, indoor lifestyles and ingrained antibiotic mentalities are selecting for AMR and there is a risk that the current pandemic exacerbates our overreliance on antibiotic approaches which are driving other unintended, longer term public health problems.

This approach considers a more nuanced understanding of microbes that recognises that not all microbes are pathogenic. In this manner, future healthy buildings should aim to discriminate between good and bad microbes and in doing so, find ways that can reduce exposure to harmful microbes but also permit the presence and agency of benign environmental microbes roles that are beneficial for human health and the resilience of buildings and cites.

The proposal will develop novel probiotic materials for buildings that contain living strains of B.subtilis, a soil derived bacteria that exhibits mechanisms which can inhibit the growth of drug resistant organisms. In the laboratory, we will engineer these probiotic materials for application in buildings that can demonstrate long term survival and ability to prevent AMR bacteria colonisation on these materials and on other building surfaces. In the workshop we will develop novel bio-fabrication approaches that will allow for these living materials to be manufactured in to a series of 1:1 living building component prototypes. These prototypes which will include floor and wall surfaces, furniture components and building panels and cladding will undergo a longitudinal microbial study in a real world building environment at OME, HBBE at Newcastle University, addressing longer term questions of how to progress this approach for building application.