Wondering whether collecting and studying phages is worth your while? Here’s a new article in Cystic Fibrosis News Today that remembers Mallory Smith, a young woman who phages could have saved, if they’d only been accessible a few days earlier. The article talks about how Mallory’s mom, Diane Shader Smith, has continued Mallory’s legacy through speaking about her story (172 presentations to date!) and fundraising for phage therapy. We highly recommend reading Mallory’s memoir, Salt in My Soul, a beautiful piece adapted from her diary entries for her last decade of life.

Carlos Guerrero-Bustamante (University of Pittsburgh) and colleagues published a new paper in MBio showing their progress toward developing a phage cocktail for tuberculosis; using genome engineering and phage genetics, they have created a five-phage cocktail effective against diverse Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains, which minimizes phage resistance and does not interfere with antibiotic efficacy.

Graça Pinto (University of Minho) and colleagues published a new paper in BMC Genomics showing insights into the genome architecture and evolution of Shiga toxin encoding phages of E. coli.

Tristan Ferry (Hospices Civils de Lyon) and colleagues published a new case report in Frontiers in Medicine describing the combination of arthroscopic “Debridement Antibiotics and Implant Retention” (DAIR) with local injection of personalized phage therapy to salvage a relapsing Pseudomonas aeruginosa prosthetic knee infection.

Shakhinur Islam Mondal (APC Microbiome Ireland) and colleagues published a new paper in International Journal of Molecular Sciences that characterizes a Clostridioides difficile-specific endolysin that affects spore outgrowth.