Episodes
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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.
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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/
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Episodes manquant?
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Standardizing the phage therapy industry through processes like clinical trails is the way to go . One of the fundamental steps to broader use of phage therapy and successful therapy is producing phages following Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and JAFRAL is the leader in this field. In today's show we sit down with JAFRAL's founder and CEO Dr. Frenk Smrekar, a visionary who has been working on the development of GMP for bacteriophages throughout his whole career. Let's give a listen to his journey of founding the company and his observation and thought on the phage therapy field development through a GMP perspective.
Learning more about JAFRAL @https://jafral.com
A review paper on GMP in Phage Therapy by https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2020.01161
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As a serial entrepreneur, Johan Wikstroem founded a phage therapy company recently with one goal in mind, to treat his own Mycobacteroides abscessus infection and more people with conditions like himself. Listen in to this week's "Phage Therapy Today" and find out more about how our guest transitioned from tech to biotech and overcoming the hurdles in this process.
Find out more about tolka.ai @https://tolka.ai
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In this week's Phage Therapy Today, we get back together with Dr. Gina Suh to learn about her recent progress and experience in the application of phage therapy at Mayo Clinic. If you are interested in learning about the first case of phage therapy in treatment of a cardiology case, leading to a successful heart transplant after the clearing of heavy bacterial burden, give it a listen to today's episode! Hear out about how things are progressing in the field and where are we going next from Gina's first hand experience.
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As more phage-based and phage-derived products and therapies emerge, swift decisions and strategies in drug development, designing clinical trials and approaching regulatory agencies come in handy. In this week's Phage Therapy Today, we sit down with Dr. Carrie-Lynn Langlais Furr, coming from a solid bacteriophage science background and coming with more than a decade's experience in phage related drug development and regulatory affairs, to talk about her advise on how to navigate these waters. Let's give it a listen to what some potential challenges lay ahead of us and how to be better prepared.
Find out more about Dr. Furr and her company Bacteriophage & Drug Development Consultants (BDDC) @https://www.linkedin.com/in/bacteriophage-and-drug-development-consultants/
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Happy Tuesday everyone and welcome back to phage therapy today! Listen in to today's episode, we sit down with Dr. Ben Temperton, Professor at University of Exeter and founder of Citizen Phage Library. Learn about Dr. Temperton's journey and his vision for how citizen phage library can help shape the phage therapy landscape.
Let's give it a listen!
Find out more about the 'Citizen Phage Library' @https://www.citizenphage.com
Find out more about Dr. Temperton's research and work @https://tempertonlab.github.io/about/ben/
Wish you all a great thanksgiving!
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Phage killing bacteria is cool but understanding phages and engineering their molecular biology is just another level cool. In today's 'Phage Therapy Today' podcast, we sit down with Dr. Steven Theriault, a proud Canadian, a scientist, and an entrepreneur from Cytophage Tehnologies Inc. Listen to the episode and learn about how he is building and expanding businesses in both clinical and agricultural markets across the globe, while constantly innovating on phage technologies and having fun.
You can find out more about Cytophage Technologies Inc. @https://cytophage.com
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Phage genome annotation is a critical component in phage therapy to help us understand the functions of phage genes and ensure efficacy of phages. In this week's phage therapy today, we sit down with the founder and CEO at Rime Bioinformatics Dr. Antoine Culot to discuss the current challenges, regulations and opportunities in using bioinformatic tools to specifically target phage therapy needs. Let's give it a listen.....
Find out more about Rime Bioinformatics and their services @https://rime-bioinformatics.com
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In today's show, we sit down with Dr. Steffanie Strathdee, whose family story of saving her husband's life from a life-threatening superbug infection using phage therapy really inspired a lot of the most important works today in the phage therapy field. Listen to today's episode to learn about her story. Among her many roles, as the director of the 'Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics' at UC San Diego, Dr. Strathdee also get to help us understand the scope of power we have today in our field and much more...
Dr. Strathdee and her husband shared their story in their memoir "The Perfect Predator: A Scientists's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug", which can be found @ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H282CPT?ref=KC_GS_GB_US
Their story has also recently been spread nationwide through CNN @https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/08/health/phage-superbug-killer-life-itself-wellness/index.html
Find out more about UCSD IPATH and their resource @https://medschool.ucsd.edu/som/medicine/divisions/idgph/research/center-innovative-phage-applications-and-therapeutics/people/Pages/default.aspx
Happy listening!
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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
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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/
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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/
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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
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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
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In business for just 5 years, Adaptive Phage Therapeutics has no doubt made tremendous progress and built itself as one of the most competitive leader in our industry. Learn about the founding story and the milestones achieved at APT from its CEO Greg Merril, and most importantly, the direction Greg envisions where we are going. Attached here is the company website: https://www.aphage.com/
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We may think the magic in phage therapy is in the treatment. That is true. But to make this magic happen, collaborative team efforts is necessary to together prepare the stage and get ready for the show. Dr. Sabrina Green is currently the director of R&D at Baylor college of medicine Tailorlabs 'https://www.bcm.edu/research/research-centers/tailor'. On this episode, we sit down and truly understand the steps required to develop a phage product and supply it to the patients. Happy Listening!
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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.
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Phage therapy today is the go to podcast to learn about current achievement and progress in phage therapy. We've gathered incredible guests joining us to share their works and ideas using phage therapy to fight this antimicrobial war. We do this together, and together we can do this.
