Issue 95
C&T Round Up for September 2020
This week, we're highlighting the four feature articles we published in September: two guest blog posts, an interview, and a recap of the two PHAVES events we hosted this month. Enjoy!
Community digest6updates4jobs2posts
Updates
Emily’s Entourage, a nonprofit organization that funds cystic fibrosis research and drug development, has funded four new grants (totaling $790,000 over two years), two of which are phage-related. One was awarded to IPATH researchers to develop a MRSA phage library, and another to Vincent Fischetti for phage lysin development.
Locus Biosciences signed a $144 million contract with BARDA to support phase II and III clinical trials of LBP-EC01, Locus' CRISPR phage (crPhage™) product.
Adaptive Phage Therapeutics was recognized as a 2020 Champion of Maryland Manufacturing for its efforts to provide emergency phage access to COVID-19 patients with secondary bacterial infections.
Laith Harb (Texas A&M University) and colleagues published a new paper in PNAS showing that host cell penetration by the F-pilus-specific ssRNA phage MS2 triggers detachment of the F-pilus.
Luís Melo (University of Minho, Portugal) and colleagues published a detailed analysis of how the Staphylococcus epidermidis biofilm matrix protects against phage predation.
Xing Wan (KU Leuven and University of Helsinki) and colleagues published a new review in Current Opinion in Biotechnology on phage-based target discovery and its exploitation towards novel antibacterial molecules.
Jobs
15 PhD positions are open as part of the virology and bioinformatics "ETN VIROINF" program, a Horizon 2020-funded program involving institutes in 8 countries. Several project openings are phage-related!
The Turner lab at Yale University is looking to hire a postdoc to study phage evolution or virus biodiversity.
The Bullough lab at the University of Sheffield, UK will soon hire a PhD student to study phage infection of C. difficile with cryoEM.
Community board
The next rendition of PHAVES will be a seminar/Q&A with Dr. Emma Bell, Principal Bacteriophage Scientist at FixedPhage, and will take place October 6th at 4PM GMT+1. She'll discuss their phage immobilization technology and how they've improved their phage production with the Cellexus CellMaker. Small group networking to follow.
Thanks to Cellexus for sponsoring this event!
Thanks so much to the nearly 300 people who attended the first iVoM webinar! The second iVoM event will be Thursday, October 15, 4PM GMT, and the theme will be "Virus structures and function".
It will feature talks by: Petr Leiman, University of Texas Kristin Parent, Michigan State University Pascale Boulanger, Université Paris-Saclay
Chairs: Deborah Hinton, NIH Paulo Tavares, Université Paris-Saclay
Register for the whole series or for individual events at https://ivom.phage.directory!
In place of a feature article this week, we're highlighting the four Capsid & Tail feature articles we published this month. Be sure to check them out if you missed them, and let us know if you have thoughts, comments or questions! Reach us anytime by email!
- Pharmacists and phage therapy: two pharmacy students weigh in, a guest blog post by Christine Thompson and Yasmine Bendimrad
- Using the CellMaker to manufacture phage: Q&A with TechnoPhage's Manuel Garrido, by Jessica Sacher
- Women in phage — an initiative to encourage female scientists, a guest blog post by Fatma Abdelrahman
- From gut phages to fish phages: a recap of September's PHAVES talks, by Jessica Sacher
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!