Researchers at Trinity Translational Medicine Institute (TTMI) and the Irish Mycobacterial Reference Laboratory at St James’s Hospital have uncovered how the bacterium Mycobacterium avium—a leading cause of difficult-to-treat chronic lung infections—changes and adapts inside patients over many years of illness.

Their findings, published in the journal Genome Medicine, could help doctors understand why M. avium infections come back and why antibiotics sometimes fail.

The team undertook this research to understand how M. avium manages to survive for years in people’s lungs, even during long courses of antibiotics. This bacterium causes a type of chronic lung infection that’s becoming more common around the world.