Phage Therapy Today

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!

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. 

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.