Issue 317
C&T Round Up for June 2025!
This month, Jess went viral with a post about How to Read Papers, we picked some great bread and butter papers, and Jess got to chat with Cytophage about navigating the Canadian regulatory phage maze.
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Evergreen 2025 is happening, and for the first time in its 50-year history, we're taking it on the road!
Register for the 26th Biennial Evergreen International Phage Meeting, which will be held August 3-8, 2025, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville!
Hosted by the Phagebiotics Research Foundation, the Denes Lab, and UTK colleagues, this event aims to bring the magic of Evergreen to a new location.
Follow @Evergreen_Phage on X for updates, or stay tuned here — Jan and Jess are excited to help out again this year!
Community digest5updates3jobs3posts
Updates
Dr. Stephen Vaughan (University of Calgary) successfully treated 76-year-old Boyd English's decade-long antibiotic-resistant hip infection using phage therapy. This is the first PJI phage treatment in Western Canada.
Masako Shimamura (Nationwide Children's Hospital and the Ohio State University) and colleagues published a new paper on dual β-lactam therapy for macrolide-resistant M. abscessus, showing successful treatment of two pediatric cases using multi-drug regimens including meropenem-amoxicillin combinations, with one case requiring additional phage therapy for hardware-associated infection clearance.
Kai Wang (Huazhong Agricultural University, China) and colleagues published a new paper on novel trimethoprim resistance genes in phage-plasmids, showing identification of two functional dfrA genes (dfrA50 and dfrA51) that confer trimethoprim resistance and are widely disseminated among pathogenic bacteria.
Jialin Xiang (Wuhan University) and colleagues published a new paper on type IV pili-mediated archaeal virus mutualism, showing that co-resident temperate viruses SNJ1 and SNJ2 establish tripartite mutualistic interactions with their haloarchaeon host through viral-encoded pili serving as receptors.
Michael Doud (University of California, San Diego) and colleagues published a new paper on AI applications in phage therapy, showing how AI can improve phage-host matching, discover novel phage genes, and guide development of synthetic therapeutic phages.
Jobs
Phagos, a French phage biotech company, is hiring for multiple roles!
Tolka AI Therapeutics in South Florida is hiring a Research Associate Intern, to study phage therapy against antibiotic-resistant superbugs through environmental sample collection and discovery pipeline optimization.
NYS Department of Health Wadsworth Center in Albany is hiring a Research Scientist 5 (equivalent to assistant/assoc. professor) to study zoonotic/vector-borne bacterial and viral pathogens, transmission mechanisms, and host-pathogen interactions.
Community board
Why don't we have phage therapy yet? We want to understand why. Come join the fun by tuning into the Podovirus podcast!
🎙️ Most recent episode: Dr. Marisa Azad, infectious disease physician at The Ottawa Hospital, shares her experience leading Canada's first-ever approved ‘n of 1’ phage therapy treatment for a prosthetic joint infection, and discusses what it took to make this happen!
🎧 Listen: Podovirus on Spotify
🎥 Watch: Podovirus on YouTube
Subscribe to get the next episodes!
🩺 Up next: We'll be talking to more clinicians, scientists and phage biotech executives about their experiences implementing phage therapy at their institutions, including the challenges and successes they've encountered along the way.
You’re invited to submit an abstract to the inaugural Conference on Bacteriophages: Biology, Dynamics, and Therapeutics, chaired by Graham Hatfull (University of Pittsburgh) and Robert (Chip) Schooley (UCSD).
Topics range from phage structure and assembly, evolution, and engineering to clinical trials, susceptibly testing, and host/immune responses.
This is organized by The International Antiviral Society–USA (IAS–USA), and will be held October 12-14, 2025, in Washington, DC.
Registration is open as of April 16, 2025! Check out the preliminary program here.
Submit your late-breaking abstract by Aug 13!
Presenting authors who are new investigators may qualify for a scholarship to cover the cost of registration.
Tolka AI Therapeutics has announced expanded access to patient-tailored phage therapy for M. abscessus infections. They're screening patients at five institutions for compassionate use where standard antibiotics have failed.
Welcome to summer, everyone!
This month, Jessica has been hard at work in the phage lab, working with a throng of new summer students. At Groq, I’ve been building tons of open source tools and templates that people can take and run with, modify, and make their own.
This month, I’ve been digging into Google DeepMind’s (of Alphafold fame) latest model, AlphaGenome. I have tons of thoughts on this model that I might just develop into another post. But generally I think it’s a really important stepping stone and research tool, but still basically scratching the surface of what’s possible.
For this month, here’s what we published:
How to navigate regulatory limbo: a Canadian phage therapy CEO’s playbook
by Jessica Sacher
In this Podovirus podcast, Jessica interviews Steven Theriault, CEO of Cytophage Technologies, about his 9-year journey navigating Canada's regulatory maze for phage therapy. Steven shares his experiences building a phage biotech company that has raised $24M and treated patients despite facing regulatory frameworks that don't account for phage biology.
In this episode, they highlight fundamental challenges from how "phages are not drugs," how they don't fit traditional regulatory boxes, how phage variability is seen as "out of spec" (rather than a benefit), to how companies could reach commercial viability through ultra-high titer production that brings treatment costs down to fractions of a cent.
Our Phage Picks for June 2025
by Jessica Sacher
In this month's Phage Picks, Jessica highlights a foundational 2009 paper by Fortier & Moineau on proper phage storage and maintenance protocols, drawing from the Felix d'Hérelle Center's decades of experience managing over 450 reference phages. For Jess, this bread-and-butter technique addresses a common phage library problem where phage collections drift genetically or die in storage due to serial propagation.
Separately, I found an excitingly comprehensive review by Steff Strathdee et. al that surveys the current landscape of AI and machine learning applications in phage therapy, covering everything from infectivity prediction to synthetic phage design. This is a paper I’m already coming back to over and over again!
How to read papers
by Jessica Sacher
In this article, Jessica explores her struggle with efficiently reading research papers. She explains how she’s stumbled across a “3-pass paper reading framework” developed by S. Keshav in 2007. The framework involves three strategic passes through a paper (10-minute filter, 1-hour comprehension check, and deep dive), with decision points at each stage about whether to continue. Jess shared tidbits in a Linkedin which went viral, and she then compiled dozens of responses from researchers sharing their own reading strategies, AI tools, and other frameworks for tackling the endless fire hose that’s scientific literature.
PHANOTATE: Gene finding in phages
Throwback: All this talk about AI nowadays, but we really have to give a special shoutout to to the folks that built the original bioinformatics tools, based on good old algorithms, traditional statistics, and machine learning.
~ Jan & Jessica
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.