Staphylococcus aureus <\/em>(MRSA), one of the most prevalent and challenging superbugs in hospitals and healthcare settings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cWhat motivates me most as a scientist is the growing public health threat of antibiotic resistance and the increasingly limited treatment options for patients with persistent, recurrent infections,\u201d Bleick said. \u201cI am particularly interested in how novel antimicrobial agents interact with existing antibiotics and behave during active infection.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bleick\u2019s work centers on understanding how bacteria adapt during treatment and how combining antibiotics with emerging therapies\u2014such as antimicrobial peptides, bacteriophages, and natural products derived from the environment and the human body\u2014can improve infection control and reduce resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A central focus of her laboratory is the study of bacteriophages, which are bacterial viruses that naturally infect and destroy specific bacteria. Bleick and her team have collected phages from soil and water sources across Rhode Island and the greater New England region, working to identify strains that effectively target MRSA. The goal is to develop a customized \u201cRhody Phage Cocktail,\u201d a carefully selected combination of phages paired with antibiotics to enhance treatment effectiveness and durability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI am driven by the question of why today\u2019s treatments often fail to clear drug-resistant infections and what we can do to make them work better,\u201d Bleick said. \u201cAlthough phages are increasingly used in compassionate-use cases, there is still limited guidance on how to optimally combine them with antibiotics. By studying the dynamics of these therapies, we aim to generate data that enable more effective treatment strategies with improved success rates, reduced resistance, fewer side effects, and less infection recurrence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bleick has been building this research program for five years, beginning as a Doctor of Pharmacy student at äçÐÄvlogÃâ·ÑBÕ¾ and continuing through her postdoctoral training before launching her independent lab. Today, her research team includes undergraduate and graduate students who help design experiments and analyze data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTraining the next generation of scientists while advancing solutions to urgent public health threats is one of the most meaningful and motivating parts of this work for me,\u201d Bleick said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KINGSTON, R.I. \u2014 July 27, 2026 \u2014 The discovery of antibiotics transformed modern medicine, turning once-deadly infections into treatable conditions and saving millions of lives. But decades of overuse and misuse have accelerated the rise of antibiotic resistance, allowing certain bacteria to evolve into dangerous \u201csuperbugs\u201d that evade even the most powerful drugs. As multidrug-resistant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":109978,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[41,1905],"class_list":["post-109977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","tag-college-of-pharmacy","tag-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109977"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109980,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109977\/revisions\/109980"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}