A fully realized Phage Foundry will enhance our ability to share knowledge, technology, and viral reagents in an equitable manner and will accelerate the bio-based economy.
Background
At its current rate, the rise of antimicrobial-resistant (AMR) infections is predicted to paralyze our industries and healthcare facilities while becoming the leading global cause of loss of human life. With limited new antibiotics on the horizon, we need to invest in alternative solutions. Bacteriophages (phages)—viruses targeting bacteria—offer a powerful alternative approach to tackle bacterial infections.
Despite recent advances in using phages to treat recalcitrant AMR infections, the field lacks broad-scale mechanistic understanding of phage-host interactions in clinically and agriculturally relevant bacteria. The ability to rationally design therapeutic phage formulations to overcome AMR pathogens quickly and with seamless adaptability to new pathogens can revolutionize the approach to combat AMR.
Phage Foundry Overview
With this goal, the team has brought together multidisciplinary and multi-institutional expertise to develop a foundational Phage Foundry platform that integrates in-depth multi-scale characterization of phage-host molecular interactions with high-throughput isolation, phage-host coevolution, machine-learning, and engineering design principles to enable rapid development of targeted phage-based therapeutics against AMR pathogens. The team envisions the Phage Foundry platform to serve as an open and integrative knowledge base available to researchers, clinicians, and industries in a fair and equitable manner, helping to power the biobased economy by developing other phage-based biotechnologies including diagnostics and vaccination strategies to treat emerging viral threats in the future.
Primary research outputs include:
- The largest and well-characterized phage bank for top pathogens.
- Platforms to quickly and rationally modify phage formulations to attack the evolved pathogens.
- Sufficient knowledge to rapidly “predict” when different phage and antibiotics will be effective in treatment of a given infection.
