Diane Shader Smith and Mark Smith have established Mallory’s Legacy Fund. Their daughter Mallory was one of the first cystic fibrosis patients to receive phage therapy (and she inspired Phage Directory’s start!). Donations will support phage therapy research projects. Watch this 2-min video on Mallory’s story, and donate here.
Dr. David Pride (IPATH, UCSD) wrote a great Scientific American article on the complexity of viruses and the human body. He talks about the tricky tasks of mapping where they are and how they spread, and managing the bad ones while exploiting the good ones. Great for sharing with your families who are undoubtedly asking you more about your work on viruses this year than ever before…
PhagoMed’s synthetic phage lysin platform for treatment of bacterial vaginosis came in second place (and won 20,000 Euro) in the European Institute of Innovation and Technology’s 2020 Health Catapult contest.
Karthik Chamakura (Center for Phage Technology and Texas A&M) and colleagues published a new paper in Nature Communications on host lysis genes discovered in leviviruses, which are single-stranded RNA phages. They characterized the function of these lysis genes in 244 leviviral genomes, and suggest this could be a rich new source of phage protein-based antimicrobials.
Shannon Miller (Broad Institute) and colleagues published a new paper in Nature Protocols on phage-assisted continuous and non-continuous evolution. This method allows directed evolution to occur much faster (100 rounds of evolution in 2 weeks), with minimal researcher intervention.
