The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) Multi-Drug-Resistant Organism Repository and Surveillance Network (MRSN) uses cutting-edge genomics to detect disease outbreaks in near real time, maintains a global repository of multidrug-resistant organisms, and provides guidance on antibiotic use. As part of its mission, the network collects bacteria from military and civilian hospitals worldwide to enable research that protects the warfighter, their families, and healthcare professionals from bacterial diseases. Over the past 15 years, MRSN has amassed more than 170,000 bacteria that researchers around the world use to develop lifesaving therapeutics.

Recognizing the opportunity to extend MRSN’s reach in the international medical R&D community and support the fight against antibiotic resistance, COL Jason Bennett, the MRSN Director, and Patrick McGann, the MRSN Deputy Director partnered with BEI Resources and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases repository for biological materials. They teamed up with WRAIR’s Senior Technology Transfer Officer, Carmen Fernandez-Prada, to develop interagency partnership agreements between WRAIR and BEI for the deposit of three MRSN panels to BEI, each containing 100 pure strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The team quickly expanded to include Yoon Kwak of MRSN’s Laboratory Operations and David Humphrey, a Licensing Officer with the Office of Medical Technology Transfer at the Defense Health Agency.

MRSN’s unique collection of diverse bacteria helps BEI meet the high demand, particularly for panels containing pure strains of bacteria known to cause serious infections. To meet BEI’s requirements for these strains the MRSN team selects and characterizes the bacteria that form the eventual panel, which is then sent to BEI for distribution to researchers and institutions that want to use those panels for research use only and have entered into material transfer agreements (MTAs). Since 2020, the MRSN team has used the interagency partnership agreements with BEI as well as no-cost (MTAs) and biological material licenses (BMLs) to ship over 3,600 MRSN’s bacterial isolates to 207 organizations in 26 countries around the world. The panels deposited at the BEI would greatly extend MRSN’s contribution to enable researchers to make crucial discoveries in disease prevention and diagnostics, novel therapeutics, and treatment of life-threatening bacterial infections. The need for such discoveries is truly urgent: A 2024 paper in The Lancet reported that more than a million people died from drug-resistant infections each year between 1990 and 2021, and it predicted that the number of deaths could reach almost 40 million by 2050.

Humphrey and Fernandez-Prada combine BMLs with MTAs to make access available to bacterial strains from the MRSN collection. For many of these MRSN bacterial strains, WRAIR has identified and isolated specific bacteriophages, or viruses that kill bacteria. The BMLs motivate companies to consider developing bacteriophage-based treatments for antimicrobial-resistant strains.

In addition to the bacteria samples shipped around the world, MRSN has contributed to BMLs and companion MTAs with Eurofins Genomics Europe Applied Genomics GmbH in Germany and Adaptive Phage Therapeutics in the United States. MRSN has also contributed to the American Type Culture Collection by depositing an A. baumannii strain that has been claimed in a patent application — an impressive T2 record for such a small team.