Issue 15
Impressions of Phage Futures 2019
This week, we attended Phage Futures Congress 2019, which we found to be a huge success!
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Updates
A perspective on phage therapy as an anti-superbug option in India.
The UK government is making some new plans to tackle antibiotic resistance, including new incentives for pharma.
Ampliphi Biosciences just published new pre-clinical data on its anti-Staphylococcus aureus phage cocktail.
If you attended Phage Futures 2019 this week, you can get access to the speakers' slides by filling out Kisaco's exit survey. We've also created our own survey, since we're really interested in what kinds of events you want to attend. Here's our 3-question survey.
NIAID just issued a request for comments and suggestions on its Antibacterial Resistance Research Framework. Details: NIAID laid out 7 approaches for tackling AMR in 2014 (including exploring phage therapy!), and they're updating these approaches this year. You can submit comments & suggestions here. Deadline: Mar. 8, 2019.
Voting in the ISVM (International Society for Viruses of Microorganisms) elections is open NOW through Feb 3! Check out the candidate bios here and vote here.
Jobs
PhD student position: Campylobacter and Salmonella phages for poultry
Dr. Hany Anany is looking for a PhD student to join his growing research group starting from May 2019. The candidate will be working on investigating phage (free and immobilized) intervention during poultry carcass processing and packaging to control Campylobacter and Salmonella contamination. The project will include phage genome analysis, studying phage host interaction (transcriptome analysis) and metagenomics analysis of various environmental samples.
The candidate should meet the University of Guelph PhD admission requirements
(Important note: for non-Canadian students, meeting the English test requirement and having at least 80% in your MSc average are mandatory for this position)
Interested candidates should contact Dr. Anany directly (hany.anany@canada.ca) and send her/his CV ASAP.
This week, we attended Phage Futures Congress 2019, which was put on by Kisaco Research (major shoutout to Jade Osei-Tutu, the lead organizer, for her incredible work bringing together so many phage people). We’re still reeling from all the new contacts we made, and the exciting conversations we had with people from phage biotechs, pharma companies, the FDA, and with phage researchers from around the world.
In our opinion, the conference was a huge success, and our expectations were definitely surpassed. We’re still processing our notes on the various talks, but plan to bring these to you soon in the form of a more comprehensive run-down.
Pilot project: Live conference coverage
In the meantime, you can have a look at the Phage Futures Live page we created for this event. This was a project we piloted for this conference, and our goal was to bring insights from the conference online in a way that would outlast the conference itself. Essentially, we live-tweeted the event, but saved the live tweets in one place on our site, alongside the agenda (so you can see who spoke) and poster abstracts.
We hope this can help jog the memories of attendees now that the conference is over, and that it can help fill in those who were not able to attend. We hope it can inspire ideas and collaborations for the phage community!
Thank you Curtis!
Importantly, we want to express our heartfelt thanks to Curtis Hoffmann @phagehunter, whose help with the live event coverage was IMMENSE and much appreciated. Curtis is an IPATH intern and BYU undergraduate student who is brimming with ideas on how to move phage research and phage therapy forward (and commitment to put these ideas into action), and we’re so glad to have been connected with him!
Send us your conference notes!
As we put together a more comprehensive retrospective on the conference, it would be great if anyone who attended the conference could send us any notes/impressions they took during/after the two days! Even if it’s just a rough set of jot-notes taken during some of the talks, or after-the-fact impressions/thoughts/ideas, it would be very cool for us to see what people found interesting or important, and to see if there are patterns that emerge or divergent impressions that people had. Like a survey, but more raw (and hopefully less work)!
We’d love to share any insights (and quotes) we gain from this with all of you (and we’re happy to keep your contributions as anonymous as you’d like)!
If you're more of a survey person
If a traditional survey is more your style, we’ve created a quick 3-question survey. This is for our own purposes and is distinct from Kisaco Research’s official event survey, which you can fill out here. Note: we also highly suggest you fill out theirs, as you’ll get access to speaker slideshows if you do!
Thanks for reading! – Jessica <>={
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!