Issue 208
C&T Round Up for January 2023!
This month, we wrote an article for GARDP about phage therapy business models. For this issue, we're also revisiting a couple of gems from Dr. Paul Jaschke's lab!
Sponsor
Sponsor
From A-Z of phage development, the 5th Bacteriophage Therapy Summit is the definitive commercial-orientated conference to accelerate phage-based applications for organizations pioneering with phage pipelines.
Explore advancements in clinical trial design to push medicinal phage therapies to the clinic, CRISPR-based gene editing to improve functionality, the rise of lytic technologies, and alternative potential for phage technologies beyond human health. This is the conference of the year for biopharma, clinicians and consumer product developers to harness the safety and efficacy of phages.
Download the full Event Guide here This event takes place February 21 - 23, 2023
Community digest1alert5updates4jobs3posts
Phage alert
Urgent need for Pseudomonas aeruginosa phages for a patient in Portugal
We are urgently seeking Pseudomonas aeruginosa phages for a patient in Portugal.
Ways to help at this stage:
- By sending your phages for testing on the patient's strains
- By receiving one or more of the patient's strains and testing your phages
- By receiving the strain(s) and using it/them to search for new phages
- By offering to prepare phages supplied by others to clinical grade
- By helping spread the word about this request
- By providing us with names/email addresses of labs you think we should contact
Please email staff@phage.directory if you can help in any way, or if you would like further details/clarification.
Let’s make a difference, Phage Directory
Updates
Dann Turner and colleagues at the ICTV published a new paper describing the abolishment of the paraphyletic morphological families of Podoviridae, Siphoviridae, and Myoviridae, as well as the order Caudovirales, and the introduction of one order, 22 families, 30 subfamilies, 321 genera, and 862 species.
Daniela Rothschild-Rodriguez and colleagues published a new paper exploring the role of phages in influencing the mucosal integrity of the human gut, and how these interactions may affect health and disease states. They also cover phage-encoded carbohydrate-interacting proteins and their influence on the human gut.
Swapnil Ganesh Sanmukh (Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia) and colleagues published a new paper in MDPI Cells on accessing the in vivo efficiency of clinically isolated phages against uropathogenic and invasive biofilm-forming Escherichia coli strains for phage therapy.
Mellissa Gomez (McMaster University) and colleagues published a new paper describing the selection of stress-resistant Listeria monocytogenes phages, and the challenges in applying them to food production environments.
Joshua D Jones (University of Edinburgh) and colleagues authored a new perspective on why patients should not be transferred between healthcare jurisdictions for phage therapy in the UK.
Jobs
The lab of Dr. Razi Kebriaei is hiring a post doc to assist in coordinating datasets and associated laboratory activities for both microbial and phage banks.
A lab at Jichi Medical University is hiring a postdoc interested in the field of microbiome, bacteriophage (phage engineering, development of phage-based therapeutic agents, bacterial gene detection reagents, vaccines, etc.), as well as in phage therapy for Tuberculosis & Nontuberculous Mycobacterial (NTM) Infections.
Vesale Bioscience is hiring a Production Manager to be responsible for the development, organization, and optimization of the phage production, and to work with the Queen Astrid Military Hospital to ensure the connection between the two production sites.
Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, TX) is hiring a Research Technician III to join TAILOR Labs, whose objective is to study the molecular and clinical properties of phage to advance the knowledge of phage therapy and phage biology.
Community board
The 6th World Congress on Targeting Phage Therapy 2023 will be held on June 1-2, 2023 in Paris, France. The aim of the meeting is to discuss all aspects related to phages and phage therapy. We will highlight the recent innovations and clinical applications of phages, validation and limitations.
The Phage Innovation Network will be launched by Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Network on Feb 16 2023 with an online event. This network is designed to bring together those in the UK with an interest in bacteriophages, their use and applications across multiple sectors, including healthcare, food and agriculture. Registration is open.
Registration is now open for An Unfinished Life: AMR Awareness Australia: In collaboration with organizations across Australia, Diane Shader Smith and Richard Alm of CARB-X are hosting a multi day, multi city, multi speaker event to premiere the Salt in My Soul film and facilitate discussions of AMR and its impacts on patients. In person events will take place March 3-16 across Australia, including Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. Key questions: Why hasn't AMR been solved yet? What needs to happen?
Hey look, we’re almost 10% into 2023! And we’ve barely written anything this month… so for this Roundup I’m digging into our archives and finding some gems! Also, I'm using the snorkel emoji because we just bought snorkels to enjoy at the beach... if you feel jealous, come visit Phage Australia we'll show you around Sydney!
Oh by the way, feel free to write about your research, your phage company, or share something phage-related!
Investing in the future of phage therapy
by Jon Iredell and Jessica Sacher
An article originally written for GARDP’s REVIVE website, Dr. Iredell and Jessica explore achieving economies of scale in provisioning and producing phages according to GMP and ensuring safety in each phage batch, and how that affects how we think about how we get paid, by getting past the old antibiotics model of volume-based pricing and exploring value- or outcome-based pricing models, based on patient outcomes.
Throwback
Engineering phage ΦX174’s genome: a recap of November’s PHAVES talk
by Dr. Paul Jaschke
This is an interesting talk by Dr. Paul Jaschke on engineering the ΦX174 genome. It’s cool (and not because he just bought us beers and pizza), but decompressing the genome to remove overlaps ended up with smaller plaque sizes, smaller burst size, poor attachment and a downregulation of two proteins involved in scaffolding and replication in comparison to wild type ΦX174.
Youtube link of Paul’s talk: https://youtu.be/qSVOKhwZzdI
Plaque size tool: an easy bioinformatics instrument for phage plaque size measurements
by Ellina Trofimova
Also from Paul’s lab is the Plaque Sizing Tool, by Ellina Trofimova. We’ve been evaluating this tool for our own use here at Phage Australia, for automating our own phage pipelines!
Jan Zheng, MHCI
I'm Jan, the other half of Phage Directory, and co-write Capsid & Tail.
Previously, I did data work at Phage Australia / Westmead Institute, where I built the biobank databases, data systems, and bioinformatics workflows for the clinical trial
I have a background in computer science and human-computer interaction, and I'm currently full-time at building the agentic layer for science at Nvidia.