Issue 234
C&T Round Up for July 2023!
This month, we heard about PHIOGEN, a new phage startup, about how the phage therapy system works at Phage Australia, and about a biobank data platform we're building at Phage Australia.
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The Evergreen International Phage Meeting is happening Aug 6-11, 2023, live in Olympia, Washington, USA! This is an in-person meeting, better known as Phage Camp! Come present your phage work, climb mountains with other phage scientists, play phage-related board games, see a special showing of the Salt in My Soul documentary, and much more! This is the 50th anniversary meeting, hosted by Betty Kutter, Queen of Phage.
Community digest5updates4jobs2posts
Updates
US Representative Morgan Griffith recently discussed the potential of phage therapy to combat antimicrobial resistance at the April 28, 2023 U.S. House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations meeting.
In a new article in Nature Reviews Microbiology, Héloïse Georjon & Aude Bernheim explore the diverse antiphage defense systems of bacteria, including nucleases, helicases, and proteases.
Jiemin Du, Susanne Meile (ETH Zurich) and colleagues have engineered phages to produce and release antimicrobial effectors, creating a promising alternative to conventional antibiotics for UTIs.
In a new preprint, Rubén Barcia-Cruz (Sorbonne Université) and colleagues describe a new family of satellites called PICMI associated with marine virulent phages.
Check out iPHoP, a new program that combines and evaluates predictions to reliably match phages with their archaea and bacteria hosts.
Jobs
The Ohio State University is hiring a postdoc to assist in coordinating datasets and associated laboratory activities for both microbial and phage banks, and to support research and development component of phage processing experiments.
University of Miami, USA is hiring a postdoc to investigate phage-bacteria interactions in South Florida ecosystems, with a focus on coral reefs, Sargassum blooms, and the Everglades.
University of Idaho is hiring a Research Scientist I or II in phage therapy to advance the principles of phage therapy and evolution for the treatment and prevention of infections.
Phages for Global Health is seeking a Volunteer Design Consultant to help develop a relatively simple image/drawing that describes the organization's four pillars and how they fit together toward accomplishing its overall mission. PGH would use this graphic to help publicize their projects and to fundraise.
Community board
Developing Scientific Guidelines for Phage Banks
The next meeting for this project will be held on August 6th at Evergreen State College and will be accessible online. We will continue to brainstorm about the topics that should be covered in the phage bank guidelines.
The meeting will run from 1:15 - 5:00 PM (PDT). For those attending in-person, lunch will be provided and will be available from 12:15 - 1:15 PM (PDT).
If you would like to attend (either in-person or virtually), please confirm this by emailing Fran Hodges (francesca.hodges@iuk.ktn-uk.org) by August 2nd.
Thanks! Tobi & Fran
I am a Ph.D. graduate in Phage Biology and Therapy seeking a postdoctoral position in phage research. My research expertise lies in the pre-clinical assessment of phages with a focus on phage therapy. I have valuable experience from working as a graduate research fellow at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, NIH, and have authored scientific articles. I am passionate about exploring novel phage-based therapeutic approaches, including phage-host interaction. I am eager to collaborate and contribute to phage research.
Sincerely, Gunaraj Dhungana, Ph.D. in Phage Biology and Therapy
Alright everyone, just about a week away from Evergreen! We’ve spent a lot of our time volunteering to get things ready, from helping the science committee organize the schedule, to setting up the abstract platform and abstract book for printing. We’re almost there!
For August, we’re slowing down our pace of Capsid & Tail so we can focus on helping out with Evergreen and making sure everything goes right.
We’re also calling out to all PhD students, postdocs, and professors to write about your phage-related research in Capsid! It’s a great way to share with the phage community what you’re doing, and get you collaborators, postdoc positions (or even postdocs!): here’s how to do it!
Here’s what we wrote this month:
How our phage therapy system works at Phage Australia
by Jessica Sacher
In this issue, Jessica described the process of setting up Phage Australia as a personalized phage therapy service. Here, she detailed the steps involved in the end-to-end process of treating a patient, from diagnostics to formulation to quality control. Jessica emphasized the challenges of running a phage therapy service and the importance of understanding patient needs, and hopes that sharing her experience will help others building a phage therapy center or any service that relies on biological manufacturing and/or multidisciplinary teams that span the lab and the clinic.
Proof & Provenance: A biobank data platform for coordinating and sharing phages and results
by Jan Zheng
In this issue, I discussed the need for an easy way to look up information about phages, including what we know about a specific phage, where it came from, and what’s been done with it. I also discussed the need for a biobank data platform for coordinating and sharing phages, and presenting phage data much like a Material Safety Data Sheet. This platform would help us establish provenance for phages, track their history, and assist in making phages auditable, shareable, and collaborative. This is also my topic for Evergreen — if you’re interested in this topic, come to my poster and demo session!
The Missing Middle Ground of Phage Therapy: Effective Phage Therapeutics that Bridge Economy, Regulation, and Unprecedented Functionality
by Amanda Burkardt
In this article, Amanda Burkardt, CEO of PHIOGEN, discusses the urgent need to find next-generation antibacterial solutions to overcome the colossal hurdle of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) which is projected to cause more than 10 million deaths by 2050. She introduces PHIOGEN, a biotech startup that has developed a business model that is economically scalable, investable, and bridges regulatory pathways. She explains the company's technology platform that produces therapeutics which address the scientific and biologic challenges bacterial pathogens use to undermine traditional medicines. By leveraging the learnings of the Emergency Investigational New Drug (EIND) cases treated by TAILOR Labs, PHIOGEN has built a world-first technology platform that mobilizes the natural power of bacteriophages to tackle the myriad of problems bacteria use to undermine medicine, including resistance. Amanda explains the PHIOGEN technology platform, which allows products to be de-risked, reducing the need for unnecessary trials and improving clinical outcomes.
C&T Throwback!
This year at Evergreen we’ll have a whole bunch of bioinformatics workshops. We’ll have the Galaxy workshop back by popular demand, so here’s a recap written by Jessica about what it is, and what it can do: Using Galaxy for phage genome annotation.
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.