Hello phage phans,

Jessica and I are writing this Capsid from sunny, sweaty, humid Cartagena, a few days before the Phage Option conference!

We’re both excited to speak at the conference:

Jessica is going to to speak about our experience in Australia, and what the future of personalized phage therapy might look like, while I’ll be speaking about how Large Language Models can be used as both language and data translators. Basically, instead of just translating papers from English to Spanish, we could “translate” them from PDFs to Excel spreadsheet datasets. It means we can easily extract data from papers, build new taxonomies, and explore data and connect dots in ways previously not possible. I have way more to say about this topic, but I’ll save it for a future Capsid issue.

Meanwhile, if you’re at Phage Option, come find us and say hello!

Best,

~ Jan & Jessica

A Mayo Clinic Physician’s Journey with Phage Therapy

by Jessica Sacher

In this Podovirus podcast episode, Dr. Gina Suh shares her insights on implementing phage therapy at Mayo Clinic over the past five years. From preventing amputations to building a clinical program, Gina discusses the real challenges and progress in bringing phage treatments to patients. She highlights how patient selection criteria have evolved, the critical role of pharmacokinetics, and the balance between fixed cocktails and personalized approaches in advancing phage therapy within a major medical institution.

A week in Australia for Viruses of Microbes 2024: Yamini’s Experience

by Yamini Bhaveshbhai Patel

Yamini Patel, an undergrad student, shares her experience at the Viruses of Microbes 2024 Conference in Australia. From Rob Lavigne’s insights on phage therapy regulations to Colin Hill’s revelations about crAssphage, the conference covered research across phage biology, host interactions, and clinical applications. Highlights also included Jill Banfield’s exploration of microbial communities, innovative bioinformatics tools, and synthetic phage construction!

Citizen Science fuels South England’s phage therapy

by Esme Brinsden

In this article, Esme Brinsden shares her experience with the Phage Collection Project, a citizen science initiative at the University of Southampton aimed at advancing phage therapy research. The project, led by early career researchers, focuses on educating the public about antimicrobial resistance, building a comprehensive phage biobank, and engaging with clinicians and policymakers. Through efforts like the Phage Isolation Course for high school students, and a global citizen sampling project, they’re working to overcome challenges in the field and empower the next generation of phage biologists.

Feeding phages to chickens: one of the first farm trials

by Jessica Sacher

C&T Throwback: Here’s an old article where Jessica covered a study published by Viviana Clavijo and colleagues from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia — where Phage Option is next week — where they tested a 6-phage cocktail on chickens in a commercial farm setting, and were able to reduce Salmonella incidence in 60,000 chickens across two trials. That’s a lot of chickens!