Phage Directory Phage Directory

Jessica Sacher, PhD

Phage Directory (Co-founder); Stanford University (Staff Scientist); Bollyky Lab

I'm a co-founder of Phage Directory and have a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Alberta (I studied Campylobacter phage biology).

For Phage Directory, I help physicians find phages for their patients, and I'm always trying to find new ways to help the phage field grow (especially through connecting people and highlighting awesome stuff I see happening in the field).

I spent 2022-2024 as a postdoc in Jon Iredell's group at Westmead Institute for Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, helping get Phage Australia off the ground. I helped set up workflows for phage sourcing, biobanking, diagnostics, production, purification and QC of therapeutic phage batches, and helped build data collection systems to track everything we did. We treated more than a dozen patients in our first year, and I'm so proud of that!

As of 2024, I joined the Bollyky lab at Stanford University as a Staff Scientist, where I'm focused on building the Stanford Center for Phage Pharmaceuticals. The ‘Phage Pharm’ will be a home for innovative phage pharmacodynamics and phage-immune interactions research, with a focus on translating findings directly to the bedside and back to the bench.

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  1. Getting our AKTA-gether: Using the AKTA Flux to purify phages for patientsThis week I’m excited to share how I’ve been using the AKTA Flux system to purify phages for patients. What used to be overwhelming now feels pretty dreamy. Worth considering for any phage lab making patient-ready preps!228Jessica Sacher
  2. Evergreen turns 50: celebrating Dr. Betty Kutter’s legacyThis week, we’re proud to open up registration for the Evergreen Phage Meeting. This year’s Evergreen phage meeting will be in-person (!), absolutely packed with science and activities (!!), and will be a celebration of both Betty’s…223Jan Zheng, Jessica Sacher
  3. Discovering coding (& building an AI tool) as a biologist, thanks to ChatGPTThis week, Jessica Sacher shows you how, as a non-coder, she got ChatGPT to help her make a chatbot that knows everything we've published across 220 Capsid & Tail blog posts (almost every week for the last 4.5 years!), how you can play with…220Jessica Sacher
  4. qPCR for phage therapy, part IIThis week Jessica Sacher continues her 'qPCR for phage therapy' series. She takes us through how we know if our qPCR worked, what to look for, and how to interpret how much phage/bacteria were in our samples based on the results.218Jessica Sacher
  5. qPCR as a window into phage therapyThis week Jessica Sacher talks about how to use qPCR to count phage and bacteria in patients during phage therapy. This is part I of a multipart series.216Jessica Sacher
  6. Lessons in scaling bio, team science & prioritiesThis week, Jessica Sacher shares learnings from setting up a pipeline for phage production/purification/QC at Phage Australia, and using it to provide phage therapy for our first 3 patients in 2022! Biggest learning: the hardest part about…210Jessica Sacher
  7. Investing in the future of phage therapyThis week, we're republishing an article Dr. Jon Iredell and Jessica Sacher wrote for GARDP Revive, the Global Antibiotic Research & Development Partnership.207Jon Iredell, Jessica Sacher
  8. 2023: A look aheadWell hello there, 2023! We’ve made great strides in the past year, gotten our hands wet in the lab (Jessica at least 😉), built data systems, and even delivered phages for patients. This year we aim to do a whole lot more of that! This…206Jan Zheng, Jessica Sacher
  9. Reflecting back on 2022We’re at the end of the year again, and what a whirlwind of a 2022 it’s been! Here's our annual end-of-year reflection on what we're most proud of, what we've accomplished, & those who've helped us along the way!205Jan Zheng, Jessica Sacher
  10. C&T Round Up for September 2022!This week, we highlight the feature articles we published in September! Learn about main themes from Phage Futures Europe 2022, MetaPhage: a new pipeline for turning raw reads into phage insights, and how to set up a basic phage QC system…195Jessica Sacher
  11. How do we prove our phages are safe?Patients need safe phages, but most regulators don't yet have official positions on what makes a phage batch safe. This week, Jessica Sacher (Iredell lab, Phage Australia) shares her recent foray into learning about phage quality control…194Jessica Sacher
  12. C&T Round Up for August 2022!This week, we highlight the feature articles we published in August! Learn about phage+AI and how you can get involved, what happened at Phage Futures this year, how phage-making is going at Phage Australia, and meet Phage Directory's…191Jessica Sacher
  13. Therapeutic phage-making: how my first batch measured upThis week Jessica Sacher shares an update on her work toward setting up a new phage-making system in the Iredell lab (part of Phage Australia).188Jessica Sacher
  14. We have the best volunteers!Our lovely phage community would not exist without the hard work of some incredible phage enthusiasts! This week, we're recognizing a few of our Phage Directory volunteers for some great stuff they've done lately.187Jessica Sacher
  15. C&T Round Up for July 2022!This week, we highlight the feature articles we published in July! Learn about Intralytix's past and present, navigating complexity when you start making phages for therapy, and the new phage-bacteria interaction atlas the Gates Foundation…186Jessica Sacher
  16. How to start making phages for therapyThis week Jessica Sacher takes us through her process for setting up a new phage-making system in the lab, including making sense of a dizzying array of options, managing overwhelm, and resisting 'optimization creep'.184Jessica Sacher
  17. C&T Round Up for June 2022!This week, we highlight the feature articles we published in June! Learn about what happened when the Phage Australia team shipped a phage around the country, Jean-Paul Pirnay's views on phage therapy, and how producing phages has changed…182Jessica Sacher
  18. C&T Round Up for May 2022!This week, we highlight the feature articles we published in May! Learn about the latest Mycobacterium phage treatment, how we might make our spot tests less subjective, how to get involved in DeSci, and what a phage biologist thought of…178Jessica Sacher
  19. Diving into a DAO as a scientist: what does help look like?You may have heard people (especially on Twitter) talking about DeSci, or decentralized science. Today Jessica Sacher shares her experience diving into LabDAO, a new DeSci initiative enabling science through a lab space/experiment sharing…177Jessica Sacher
  20. 500 days of phage beats M. abscessus in the CF lungThis week, we highlight a new case report published last week in Cell. It documents the successful phage therapy of a Mycobacterium abscessus infection, which led a 26-year old in Colorado with cystic fibrosis to receive a lung transplant…176Jessica Sacher

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