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The Society for Bacteriophage Research and Therapy, SBRT, a new society in Varanasi, India, is accepting new members. Their goal is to work together as a team for the betterment of bacteriophages and their positive global impact. Find them

A new phage pharmacokinetics paper by Katarzyna Hodyra-Stefaniak and colleagues in Krystyna Dabrowska's group at the Polish Academy of Sciences has demonstrated a "short-circulating phage" phenotype that has implications for engineered phag

A new patent on phage compositions and uses was published this month by Paul Turner, Benjamin Chan and John Wertz. Their invention includes phage compositions and methods to increase antibiotic sensitivity in bacteria, a pharmaceutical comp

Diane Shader Smith is the mother of Mallory Smith, the 25-year-old who passed away in 2017 from an antibiotic resistant lung infection. Diane has given a TEDx talk (14 min) about Mallory's life, legacy and memoir: Salt in My Soul. Diane des

This week on #PhageTwitter: a fantastic and informative Twitter thread (with images and videos!) by Patrick R. Secor (@PRSecor) on how filamentous P. aeruginosa phage Pf spontaneously forms liquid crystals in the presence of polymers, which

Two new phage bioinformatics tools for you this week: first, a phage host finding tool: link phages and potential hosts by finding shared attachment sites for prophage integration (GitHub), and second, Prophage Hunter: an integrative huntin

This NPR article discusses Locus Biosciences' upcoming E. coli urinary tract infection phage therapy trial and interviews one of the trial volunteers—Alfonso Evans, a US Army veteran who was paralyzed by a spinal cord injury and thus suffer

Rick Bright, Director of BARDA, shared his opinion on how the recent bankruptcy of Achaogen (a BARDA-funded biotech that recently brought an antibiotic to market, then saw such poor sales that it closed its doors) proves that the marketing

A new paper by Alexander Meeske and colleagues at Rockefeller University shows that CRISPR-Cas13, poorly understood compared to other CRISPR-Cas systems, leads to host cell growth inhibition (through degradation of both phage and host RNA)

An interesting reflection by Prof. Marc Bonten of UMC Utrecht on the current impasse in the Netherlands when it comes to the need for phage clinical trials, and on UMCU's recent discussions with national health authorities on the matter.

A new paper by Bryan Hsu and colleagues at Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital showed (in the mouse gut) that introducing phages led to predictable shifts in the targeted population, but also had "cascading effects" on non-phage-suscep

Virome datasets are being generated at unprecedented rates, but new data are rarely cross-compared, which leads to virus novelty being inflated in new datasets and many viral sequences going undetected. A new preprint by Ann Gregory and col

BiomX, a phage therapy biotech company, just announced that it's licensed new bacterial targets for commercialization of phage therapies for Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC; a rare, progressive liver disease). The targets: strains of Kl

The now-constant flood of phage sequence data is showing that tailed phages are more genetically diverse than previously thought. This has led to a re-classification of tailed phages, which is described in a new paper by Jakub Barylski and

#### Dear phage community, We recognize the importance of supporting fundamental phage research, because effective phage therapy starts from a basic understanding of phages. We're excited to announce that we're working on publishing affo

A new paper by Mohammad Tariq and colleagues at the University of Northumbria describes induction of temperate P. aeruginosa phages isolated from patients with cystic fibrosis or bronchiectasis. The more advanced the disease, the broader ho

The journal Viruses has announced that it is now accepting nominations and applications for two travel awards. Awards (800 Swiss Francs each) can be applied to a virology conference in 2020, and can be awarded to PhD students or postdocs.

ContraFect has received a $7.2 Million grant from the US Army Medical Research and Development Command to advance their engineered phage lysin candidate CF-296 for Staphylococcus aureus infections.

Intralytix announced that it will be collaborating with the Eliava Foundation and Ferring Pharmaceuticals to develop new phage-based drugs to improve reproductive medicine and women's health through modulation of the vaginal microbiome.

Vorrapon Chaikeeratisak and colleagues at UC San Diego, the group that discovered that certain Pseudomonas phages replicate their DNA inside a phage-encoded nucleus-like structure, have now published that the capsids of these phages traffic