Issue 1
Phage therapy returns to the US
Welcome to the first issue of Capsid & Tail, a mini-periodical of links, topics, and commentary that covers the ins and outs of the phage world.
Community digest4updates
Updates
Pherecydes published the long-awaited results of PhagoBurn, the first blinded, controlled, randomized phage trial on burn patients.
Steffanie Strathdee and Urmi S. Bajpai announced a new 12-month postdoc position starting July 2019. The postdoc will work on phages in Dr. Bajpai’s lab at ANDC in Delhi. Contact urmibajpai@andc.du.ac.in to apply (fellowship application deadline is November 15, 2018).
Phage Futures (January 29-30, 2019) is a translational phage therapy conference where Steffanie Strathdee, Tom Patterson, the FDA, and others will discuss how we move phage therapy forward in the US. Registration is open to all - use code “PHDI10” for 10% off. We'll also be there!
Phage therapy has been around for almost a century, but has had its various starts and stops. The attempts to use phages to battle against bacterial infections were more or less halted when antibiotics became a thing in the 40's.
In the last decade, antibiotics have started to lose their edge against bacteria, and more people are now suffering from antibiotic resistant infections.
One of these people was Tom Patterson, who suffered a case from antibiotic-resistant Acinetobacter baumanii, which he caught from a vacation trip to Egypt. Luckily for him, his wife is the associate dean of global health sciences, and an unstoppable force of nature, and was able to save his life by gathering a crack team of doctors and researchers in the nick of time.
Watch her describe her efforts in her TedX talk:
or listen to an interview on iTunes or Stitcher with Steffanie and Tom:
You can also read the case study the medical team published or hear what their head doctor, Robert "Chip" Schooley has to say about the case on the JAMA podcast (iTunes or Stitcher).
More recently, Steffanie and Tom announced that they're publishing a memoir to detail their experiences. It's available for preorder on Amazon, so please check it out.
Next issue, we'll cover phage clinical trials—what's been done, what was learned, and what's in the works.
Thanks for reading! ~ Jan and Jessica
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Jessica Sacher, PhD
I'm a co-founder of Phage Directory and have a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Alberta (I studied Campylobacter phage biology). For Phage Directory, I help physicians find phages for their patients, and I'm always trying to find new ways to help the phage field grow (especially through connecting people and highlighting awesome stuff I see happening in the field).
I spent 2022-2024 as a postdoc in Jon Iredell's group at Westmead Institute for Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, helping get Phage Australia off the ground. I helped set up workflows for phage sourcing, biobanking, diagnostics, production, purification and QC of therapeutic phage batches, and helped build data collection systems to track everything we did. We treated more than a dozen patients in our first year, and I'm so proud of that!
As of 2024, I joined the Bollyky lab at Stanford University as a Staff Scientist, where I'm focused on phage engineering and delivery (to both microbial and human cells) and hydrogel-embedded phage cocktail development for wounds!