The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation announced they will provide up to $5M to support Armata Pharmaceuticals in conducting a Phase 1b/2 clinical trial to test the safety and tolerability of phage therapy in Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections in people living with cystic fibrosis.
Germán Bonilla-Rosso (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) and colleagues published a new paper in PNAS on the honey bee gut virome. They show that a diverse community of phages inhabits the bee gut, that these phages target core bee gut bacteria, belong to new viral genera, and have a large repertoire of unknown functions.
Zachary Barth (UC Berkeley) and colleagues published a new preprint showing their use of RNA sequencing to study how a family of viral satellites interacts with the phages they parasitize. They found that the satellites manipulate invading phage gene expression and also affect cholera toxin mobilization. See also this informative Twitter thread on the paper by Kimberley Seed, whose lab did the study.
Elizabeth Burgener (Stanford University) and colleagues published a new preprint on methods for extracting and detecting phage DNA from CF patient sputum.
Check out this episode of the Genome Insider podcast (by the Joint Genome Institute): Gary Trubl of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory talks about the wonders of viruses that live in soil and their potential impacts on greenhouse gas release.
Tommi Vatanen, a senior research fellow at the University of Auckland-based Liggins Institute in New Zealand, will explore the role of gut phages in obesity with a new $300k Marsden Fund grant.
The first issue of Mary Ann Liebert’s PHAGE journal is available now online.
