Phage Foundry PI Vivek Mutalik (LBNL) was invited to present at a conference discussing implementation of phage therapy in the UK and the latest breakthroughs in phage engineering research.
The conference report, “Realizing phage therapy in the UK,” is now available in Nature Microbiology. Excepts are shared below.
On November 25, 2025, the international phage therapy research and biotechnology communities gathered in Liverpool, UK, to discuss progress in implementing clinical phage therapies and the latest technological breakthroughs in phage biology and engineering, while UK regulators and health agencies provided the latest guidance.
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The conference, funded as part of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) Engineering Biology ‘SafePhage’ Mission Award for developing engineered phages, sought to address two key questions: what can the UK learn from the state of the art of phage therapy implementation in other countries? What cutting-edge scientific discoveries and new technologies exist that could accelerate development of phage therapeutics?
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Mechanistic understanding of phage–bacteria interactions could enable rational design of phage therapies from first principles. The initial step in the phage infection process is to bind to receptors on the bacterial cell surface. Genome-wide knockout, knockdown or overexpression screens are emerging as powerful tools for identifying phage binding receptors at scale. Vivek Mutalik from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA, explained how such large-scale automated experimental screens, containing in some cases more than 3,000 genome-wide screens, sampling over 1.7 million host factor–phage pair interactions, can be combined with machine learning to predict phage-binding determinants from genome sequences6. Such approaches have high accuracy for predicting protein receptors, including outer membrane porins, flagella and type IV pili, but perform less well at predicting phage binding to lipopolysaccharides. These mechanistic data describing molecular interactions provide an essential back-end characterization feeding into rational phage engineering efforts within the group’s Phage Foundry (https://phagefoundry.org/).
Brockhurst MA, Fothergill JL, van Houte S, Westra ER. Realizing phage therapy in the UK. Nat Microbiol 2026:1–3. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-026-02280-z.