56 JUNE 2025 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WAS.ORG How does the ever developing and expanding aquaculture industry manage to balance the worldwide demand for high-quality food protein with the pressing challenges of disease management, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and stressed fish populations - especially in the face of climate change? Fortunately, the constant and necessary interactions between industry stakeholders, academia, and policy makers in the context of One Health keep on fostering promising collaborations towards sustainable and tangible solutions to the sector’s most significant issues. Meet ‘Cure4Aqua’. The Cure4Aqua Consortium Cure4Aqua is a project funded by the European Union (EU Horizon 2020) with the goal of bringing fish welfare and consumer safety to the forefront of aquaculture, by highlighting preventive approaches against important challenges in the industry, across different levels of production and life-stages, and for different farmed species. Its consortium comprises several institutions around Europe, but also in Thailand and Chile, where members have offered their expertise in setting up a solid plan to tackle some of the most significant challenges the aquaculture industry has been facing. Such an interdisciplinary approach is crucial considering the intensification approaches, the changing climate effects and the development of AMR in the field. With a focus on improving disease prevention, early detection of pathogens, and biosecurity standards and building from previous knowledge in these respective fields, several working groups have been setting the framework for contributing to a much more resilient and sustainable sector. Efforts to improve fish welfare include developing vaccines, probiotics, and bacteriophages to prevent and fight disease, improving selective breeding to enhance disease resistance, establishing clear welfare indicators, and advancing precision farming along with non-invasive diagnostic tools to monitor fish health. Obviously, such work encompasses numerous trials, and the development of tailored tools and protocols, making it necessary to narrow down the focus to specific fish species. In Cure4Aqua, the reared species of focus have been the European seabass, the gilthead seabream, the common carp, the rainbow trout, and the Senegalese sole. The Growing Threat of Flavobacterium psychrophilum: a Dangerous Opportunist Our research group at the Technical University of Denmark has been working as a Cure4Aqua partner on the development of using beneficial bacteria, so-called probiotics, as disease control measures in rainbow trout aquaculture. Rainbow trout is a fish species of great economic importance in Denmark, and worldwide, and along with other salmonid species such as the Atlantic salmon and coho salmon, it has been affected by the globally distributed bacterial pathogen Flavobacterium psychrophilum. This pathogen is particularly detrimental in freshwater aquaculture, causing Rainbow Trout Fry Syndrome (RTFS), which, as the name suggests, specifically affects fry fish in hatcheries, where the rearing temperatures for this fish are maintained between 4o-10o Fishing for Probiotics in Familiar Pools: The Fight Against the Salmonid Pathogen, Flavobacterium psychrophilum Despoina Athena-Vasileiadi, Mikkel Bentzon-Tilia and Lone Gram FIGURE 1. Schematic of microbiota subpopulations, functions, interactions and affecting parameters within an aquaculture rearing tank. Our research aims to find native strains from these populations with potential for pathogen inhibition. Adapted from Sehnal et al. 2021, created with Biorender.com How does the ever developing and expanding aquaculture industry manage to balance the worldwide demand for high-quality food protein with the pressing challenges of disease management, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and stressed fish populations - especially in the face of climate change? Fortunately, the constant and necessary interactions between industry stakeholders, academia, and policy makers in the context of One Health keep on fostering promising collaborations towards sustainable and tangible solutions to the sector’s most significant issues. Meet ‘Cure4Aqua’.
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