Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Situated within the AMR crisis, this paper investigates anti-virulence therapies, which disarm microbes rather than destroy them, as promissory alternatives. It asks whether this approach troubles the paradigm of antibiosis and what it reveals about shifting human-microbe futures in modern medicine

Paper long abstract

The crisis of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses an existential threat to modern medicine. It has called into question the efficacy of the long-dominant antibiosis (kill-or-be-killed) paradigm, in which microbes are viewed as threats to be eradicated. Against this backdrop, non-traditional therapies have emerged as a key focal point of AMR innovation, including some approaches that seek to move beyond antibiosis.

This paper investigates one such alternative: anti-virulence therapies (AVTs). Rather than killing bacteria, AVTs aim to disarm the pathogenic properties that make humans sick. While AVTs are frequently positioned as emblematic of a more ecological turn in biomedicine, it remains unclear how actors advancing this field conceptualise anti-virulence, both clinically and theoretically. This paper asks how AVTs are articulated as promissory alternatives to conventional antibiotics, by investigating the discourses and practices surrounding AVT research.

The paper (1) maps the diverse set of AVTs amidst the broader turn to non-traditional approaches; (2) analyses the scientific, clinical, regulatory challenges related to their development; and (3) examines how AVT research is entangled with shifting ideals of how humans relate to microbes in the context of AMR innovation.

The paper deploys a mixed-methods approach combining conference ethnography, document analysis and semi-structured interviews. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), the social studies of microbes, and critical biopolitics, it examines how post-antibiotic futures of human-microbe relations are articulated in practice. It argues that these futures are not merely speculative, but actively shape how innovation proceeds, reconfiguring notions of agency, control and coexistence in 21st-century biomedicine.