PhageCast

In our conversation with Paul Turner we covered his research on phage evolution and how he has applied his findings to treating Cystic fibrosis patients against MDR Pseudomonas aeruginosa with phage therapy.

Phages have the power to select on certain bacterial treats, thus, the understanding of how bacteria develop resistance to phage can make us be better prepared to respond to this resistance. Paul Turner´s lab is applying this knowledge, predicting the trade-offs of bacterial resistance to phage, to achieve bacterial killing reversing the antibiotic resistance.

He talked about ongoing work in this matter, how these findings are translated from in vitro to in vivo, and he also gave really inspiring and insightful advice for the people in the field.

https://turnerlab.yale.edu/publications/personalized-inhaled-bacteriophage-therapy-decreases-multidrug-resistant-pseudomonas

Dr. Paul Turner is the Rachel Carson Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and Microbiology faculty member at Yale School of Medicine. his research focuses on the evolutionary genetics of viruses, particularly RNA viruses, and phages that infect bacterial pathogens & the use of phages to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial diseases.

He is also quite active in science-communication and outreach to the general public, and he has a TED talk that you can find online on the use of phages to treat antibiotic resistant bacteria.

In the first part you heard how phage therapy is done in Belgium, how it started and his view on phage therapy today, and how it will be done in the future.
You also got a first glance into the data of their 100 first cases and their treatment efficacy rates, adverse reactions, the main infections they are treating, the limitations and bottlenecks of the study and the process, etc. (link here in the end of the description)
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The second part of the conversation covers all other details like how to deal with phage resistance, how phages are selected for use in patients, the use of phages in combination with antibiotics, how they do their phage adaptations… and you will get to hear some of Jean-Paul´s advice to PhD students and early career researchers!
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Stay till the end and we hope you enjoy the episode as much as we did!
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.28.23294728v1
Retrospective, observational analysis of the first one hundred consecutive cases of personalized bacteriophage therapy of difficult-to-treat infections facilitated by a Belgian consortium

In this episode you can hear our chat with Pilar Domingo-Calap. (@pilardomingoc)

She is the leader of the Environmental and Biomedical Viruses Lab (#EnBiVirLab) in the Insitute for Integrative Systems Biology (University of Valencia, in the Spanish National Research Council, and the co-founder of Evolving Therapeutics

You can also hear the business model that they have implemented in Evolving Therapeutics to treat patients and much more on her experience and career!

Enjoy!

In this episode, we are introducing Phage Bites, a new format that will feature short episodes with interviews to early stage researchers and PhD students that want to share their current work and achievements.

In this episode, Veronique Ongenae, a PhD student in Leiden University, is telling us about an article she recently published "Reversible bacteriophage resistance by shedding the bacterial cell wall", where they described that the transition of bacteria to L-forms prevents the complete eradication by phages in osmoprotective environments. By the end of the episode, you can also hear Veronique´s experience as a PhD student.

Enjoy the episode!

On our fifth episode, we are introducing a well-known member of the phage community: he holds the title of Associate Professor in Monash University and the Head of Bacteriophage Biology Research Group, to our eyes a person with a really impressive and inspiring career at a very young age!

In our conversation you will hear him introducing unpublished work: how they are implementing phage therapy to target a bacterial outbreak in a hospital, by isolating and training phages to create a cocktail, in a way of seeing phage therapy that stands between a fixed cocktail and personalized treatments of single phages.

On the personal side, Jeremy is sharing some advices and lots of excitement for the future of the field.

Enjoy!

He discusses and shares with us here some details on this protocol, that we believe is useful for every phage lab.

We speak about his current work as consultant and what his company offers, and we could dig into his interesting career path.

Ben shared with us what he thinks is most exciting in the phage field and the best advice for PhD students and early career scientists.

Enjoy!

Worth reading: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30862096/

Welcome to this episode of our podcast, where you can hear

Rob is a renowned expert in the field of bacteriophage

During our discussion, Rob shares his latest research

He explains how his team discovered the Igy peptide, which was initially labeled as hypothetical protein but was found to inhibit bacterial DNA gyrase and replication. You will hear Rob walking us through the fascinating protein-protein interaction experiments that led to this discovery. (DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109567)

You will also hear about RNA sequencing and the importance of this work.

Please stay till the end because our conversation with Rob goes beyond his impressive research accomplishments. He also shares some personal insights on how to cope with research failures and avoid the trap of comparing oneself to others. His advice is very practical and we actually found it quite inspiring.

So thank you for joining us for this episode, Enjoy!