Podovirus

An interview with Jerry Nick, a professor at National Jewish Health!

An interview with American Society for Microbiology (ASM) members Dev Mittar and Neha Prasad discussing ASM and phage therapy!

An interview with Ella Balasa!

An interview with Deborah Birx discussing phage therapy!

Rebekah Dedrick shares her background in phage research and her transition to the Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Foundation. She explains how her work with mycobacteriophages intersected with clinical applications, particularly in treating CF patients with infections resistant to conventional antibiotics.

What if you could build biology in a tube, no cells required? Invitris is a Munich-based cell-free synthesis company starting with bacteriophages. Kilian Vogele, co-founder of Invitris, joins Jessica and Joe to explain how cell-free phage production works — and why they're building toward a "phage printer" that could sit in a hospital.

Topics covered:

• How cell-free phage production actually works

• Why removing bacteria removes a lot of contamination problems

• Phages as Lego sets — mix-and-match engineering

• Building a phage printer for hospitals

• Where AI-generated phages fit (and don't)

• What it takes to get cell-free phages into a clinical trial

Kilian Vogele is the co-founder of Invitris, a Munich-based cell-free synthesis company currently focused on bacteriophage production. Trained as a physicist at TU Munich, he co-founded Invitris out of a 2018 iGEM project and has been building toward decentralized, on-demand cell-free manufacturing — starting with phages.

“The thing everybody thinks is a tailwind for our space — the low financial barrier to get into a clinical trial — is actually one of the largest headwinds.”

Paul has spent 35 years in biopharma, and he has a sharp take on why phage therapy isn't pulling in the same kind of investment as other biotech sectors. Cheap, small trials have produced mediocre data that's spooked the money — and the field is paying for it.

In this episode, Paul walks us through what it actually takes to get phage drugs through the clinic, why his company believes intracellular pathogens are the next frontier, and how Locus went from a CRISPR-Cas3 startup to dosing patient 188 of 288 in what may be the largest phage clinical trial ever.

In this episode:

• How Locus tested CRISPR-Cas3 delivery via phage, nanotech, and cell-penetrating peptides — and why phage won
• The EpiBiome acquisition and the $800M Janssen partnership
• Why Phase 0 trials are worth the investment
• The problem with low-cost, underpowered clinical trials damaging the field’s reputation
• Getting PKPD right before progressing — “the right drug at the wrong dose still fails”
• Why intracellular pathogens could unlock phage therapy as a new field of medicine
• The 5-year plan (engineered cocktails for MDR infections) and 15-year vision (anti-inflammatory, oncology, neurology)
• Advice for researchers: work on payloads, chase government funding, and don’t give up on the microbiome

Guest: Paul Garofolo, CEO of Locus Biosciences (@locusbio)
Hosts: Jessica Sacher & Joe Campbell

Learn more: https://www.locus-bio.com/

Chip Schooley (UC San Diego, IPATH) and Graham Hatfull (University of Pittsburgh) join us to discuss why phage therapy needs biologists and clinicians collaborating — and what the HIV field’s playbook can teach us.

Topics covered:
• Why they organized an academic phage conference in Washington, D.C.
• The state of in vitro phage assays and the reproducibility problem
• How to design phage clinical trials that actually teach us something
• Phage resistance, fitness trade-offs, and the role of the immune system
• What HIV’s journey from 1988 to 1998 tells us about where phage therapy is headed
• Why synthetic biology is the future of phage therapeutics
• The need for young scientists entering the field

Guests:
Chip Schooley — Co-founder, IPATH Phage Therapy Center, UC San Diego. Physician behind the Tom Patterson case. HIV research veteran.
Graham Hatfull — University of Pittsburgh. Runs the world’s largest phage collection. Creator of SEA-PHAGES.

Hosts:

Jessica Sacher & Joe Campbell

Links:

IAS-USA: The conference Chip & Graham describe in the episode was sponsored by the International Antiviral Society-USA (Executive Director: Donna Jacobsen): https://www.iasusa.org/

What does it take to build a phage therapy program from nothing — and keep your research lab running at the same time?

In this episode, Joe and I sat down with Dr. Daria Van Tyne, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and researcher in the Division of Infectious Diseases at UPMC.

When Daria arrived at Pitt in 2018, she describes herself as "phage poor" — a lot of interest in phages, zero phages in hand.

Today, her lab manufactures phage for dozens of compassionate use patients per year, all while continuing to publish research.

Daria's commitment to owning the process end to end is especially fascinating to hear about — right down to personally doing the phage formulation herself every morning after preschool drop-off, because, as she put it: "if I'm making something that's going to be administered intravenously to patients, I want to be the one to own it."

🔬 Highlights:

Building a phage library from scratch: How Daria used multidrug-resistant clinical isolates as bait to fish phages out of hospital and municipal wastewater — ensuring clinical relevance from day one.

The first cases: From a cystic fibrosis patient post-lung transplant with Burkholderia multivorans in 2020, to partnering with Ben Chan at Yale and Breck Duerkop at Colorado when they didn't have the right phages in-house.

Making manufacturing sustainable: Only using phages so good undergrad students can make them grow reliably, batching workflows, pre-manufactured cocktails, protein low-bind tubes, and more.

QC that works for her lab and the FDA: Whole genome sequencing for identity and purity, cesium chloride banding, endotoxin testing, USP-71 sterility.

Working with the FDA: From nerve-wracking Friday evening conference calls for emergency INDs to the much calmer world of single-patient INDs and email correspondence — and why she sees the FDA as a partner, not a gatekeeper.

The phage susceptibility testing problem: Why the field still lacks standardized, clinically translatable assays, and what it would take to make phage susceptibility testing work in a real clinical microbiology lab.

Research questions that keep her up at night: Phage resistance evolution in patients, whether phages can clear biofilm infections, and what phage therapy actually does to the microbiome.

The future she's hoping for: FDA-approved phage products, with compassionate use and clinical trials coexisting for the long tail of complex cases — and her biggest fear being that investor money kills the collaborative spirit that has made the field work.

📺 Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nbN4whcoJrU

🔗 Learn more:

Pittsburgh Phage Program (P3): https://dom.pitt.edu/id/research/phage/

Can AI design living organisms from scratch? Samuel King and Claudia Driscoll from the Arc Institute used genome language models to generate functional phages—and 16 of them actually worked in the lab. Not only that, they killed bacteria equally or better than the natural phage the team used as a template. 

In this episode, we dig into how they did it, what it means for phage research, and why this could be a new way to explore evolution and design genomes.

What we covered:

• How genome language models work (ChatGPT, but for DNA)

• Training on millions of phage genomes with Evo-1 and Evo-2 

• The creativity (from biologists!) required to figure out how best to filter generated sequences

• Going from 4000 selected sequences in silico, to 300+ synthesized candidates, to 16 working phages

• Fresh phage lab protocols for new ways to look at phage fitness

• Phage "personalities" that emerged from the generated candidates

• Watching recombination occur among a cocktail of designed phages

• Cost realities: hundreds of dollars per 5kb genome candidate, but emerging ways to reduce it exist!

• Good news: All tools are open source and free to use!

The preprint:

Samuel H. King, Claudia L. Driscoll, David B. Li, Daniel Guo, Aditi T. Merchant, Garyk Brixi, Max E. Wilkinson, Brian L. Hie (2025-09-17). Generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language models | bioRxiv. biorxiv.org. Retrieved November 8, 2025, from https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.12.675911v1

More resources:

• Arc Institute Evo browser interface: https://arcinstitute.org/tools/evo

• GitHub (open source code): Evo2: https://github.com/ArcInstitute/evo2) 

• Hugging Face (model downloads): https://huggingface.co/arcinstitute

Guests:

Samuel King: PhD candidate, Stanford/Arc Institute, Brian Hie's lab; follow @samuelhking on X

Claudia Driscoll: Postdoc, Arc Institute, Brian Hie's lab, follow @driscoll_cl on X

Also follow @BrianHie, @arcinstitute, @stanford on X for more from this team!