Phage Therapy Today – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Happy Tuesday Everyone and Welcome back to the latest episode of Phage Therapy Today!

Phage science is awesome, the business is growing, and the numbers on paper are looking great. But along with this excitement, we must realize the end goal is to save lives and improve clinical outcomes. The truth is phage therapy is still very far from accessible to the general public today.

There are many reasons for this, and the lack of information and community available to the general public and doctors is definitely a major contributing factor. Because phage therapy is not yet the standard of care and is considered experimental, doubt from doctors and patients can delay the start of phage therapy treatment.

In this week’s episode, Christopher Schaffer shares his story of how he saved his own life by going on a journey where he took the lead in finding a cure for his MDR infection. He did tons of research on his own, reaching out to all the help  he could get, and navigating through difficult situations related to Covid and the Ukraine war. The amount of courage, determination, and faith he demonstrated is awe-inspiring. Let’s give it a listen!

To bridge this gap, I am unofficially announcing the formation of a nonprofit organization led by Christopher Schaffer, Professor Irene Chen, and myself. Our aim is to create a community for patients and doctors looking into phage therapy. The goal is to provide information on success stories from past patients to build trust in phage therapy, connect with therapeutic resources, and provide support to all going through AMR infections, ensuring you are not alone out there.

As a first step, I would like people to re-post, @doctors, and patients who require phage therapy resources to join our Discord group at: https://discord.gg/gtrX5ZpE. We would also like everyone else passionate about phage therapy to join and comment in the “volunteers” and “general” channels only.

Welcome back to Phage Therapy Today! As phage therapy is becoming global, so are funding opportunities. In this week's episode, our guests, Dr. Mercedes Gonzalez from Incubator for Antibacterial Therapies in Europe (INCATE) and Dr. Gregorio Iraola, at Kinzbio sat down with us to talk about these funding opportunities and how startup companies can benefit from them. Let's give it a listen!

Learn more about INCATE organization and opportunities at: https://www.incate.net/about-us/

Find out more about Kinzbio's Jumbo Phage technology at: https://www.kinzbio.com/

INCATE is organizing the 8th AMR Conference & phage workshop: https://amr-conference.com/program-2024/

How do bacteriophages shape bacterial fitness and how does it lead to the resensitiization of antimicrobials? In today's show, we are delighted to have Dr. Jeremy Barr from Monash University to talk about his research and his recent republication on Nature Microbiology "Bacteriophage-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii are resensitized to antimicrobials". Maybe it's time for us to have a better understanding of the key pathogens' cellular biology and defense mechanisms to combat the challenge of AMR. 

You can find the article @https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00830-7 and find out more about Dr. Barr's research @https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Ebx3KmEAAAAJ&hl=en 

Find out about Australia's collaborative effort on phage therapy @ https://phageaustralia.org

There have been several quite famous successful cases of using phage therapy for treatment. One of those cases was carried out at Mayo Clinic by the founder and director of Mayo Clinic’s Phage Therapy Program Dr. Gina Suh. Listen to our conversation on this story and the consideration along the process. We dig deep into how physicians are perceiving phage therapy and where we will go from there. 

Check out Dr. Suh's recent publication 'Considerations for the Use of Phage Therapy in Clinical Practice' :https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35041506/

Welcome back to Phage Therapy Today and in this episode, we have Dr. Minmin Yen from PhagePro joining us to discuss her and her team's recent progress on bringing preventive phage therapy product to fight Cholera, an acute, diarrheal illness that's often associated with poverty, poor infrastructure and social injustice. Listen to her journey of bringing her research to entrepreneur execution and how our phage therapy community has been involved.

Find out more about PhagePro at: https://www.phageproinc.com/ 

Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator(CARB-X) is one global nonprofit partnership that manages a large portfolio of early stage companies to do the job as described by its name. In this episode, we are happy to have its chief scientist Dr. Richard Alm to help us paint a broad picture of the antimicrobial landscape and discuss their investment strategies related to phage therapy. The global biotech is a $800B dollar market this year, with a >15% CAGR, what can we do to promote the scientific understanding of phage and phage therapy in this capital driven economy? 

Find out more about CARB-X at their website: https://carb-x.org

Dr. Austen Terwilliger is the director of operations at BMC TailorLabs, overseeing the cooperation between phage providers, physicians and regulatory agencies. In this conversation, we sit down and understand the dynamic nature in these processes and let's take a minute to think about how we can setup standards to better help patients. 

Check out Dr. Terwilliger and BMC Tailorlab's latest work: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/13/10/2049

Dr. Irene Chen is currently a faculty member at UCLA working on building the next generation phage therapy platform. If you are new to this field and want to catch up a bit, this is the right episode for you. On this episode, we'll talk about what phages are, what phage therapy is, what's the current state of art and much more. Besides the amazing science and technology phages are providing us, let's envision what really does phage therapy mean for our society. Yes, some of these stuff, you can learn about just from the other 10 podcast episodes on phage out there but it's simply better here.