Jessica Sacher, PhD
Phage Directory (Co-founder); Stanford University (Staff Scientist); Bollyky LabI'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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- How the Queen Astrid Military Hospital processes phage requestsThe Queen Astrid Military Hospital in Brussels has treated patients with phages since 2007, but lately, they've had a lot more phage therapy requests. This week, we're highlighting a recent report describing who's doing the requesting, what…
- Improving access to phage therapy in IndiaWe interviewed Pranav Johri, a former phage therapy patient who founded Vitalis Phage Therapy to help others access phage therapy, especially in his home country of India.
- Phage banks around the worldWhere can you buy phages, and where can you deposit yours? This week, we take a tour of phage banks around the world.
- First case of engineered phage therapyThis week, we highlight a new paper documenting the first use of engineered phages in human therapy, published yesterday by Rebekah Dedrick, Carlos Guerrero-Bustamante, and colleagues in Nature Medicine.
- Book Review: The Perfect PredatorWhat love, community, and phages can do: this week, we bring you a review of Steffanie Strathdee and Tom Patterson's phage therapy memoir, The Perfect Predator.
- Collaboration leads to phage therapy successThe first case of phage therapy in Israel shows how patients can benefit from collaborations between academia, medicine, military and biotech.
- Using zebrafish to model phage therapyThis week, we highlight a useful new animal model for the phage therapy community.
- How do we commercialize phage therapy? A full recap of Phage Futures 2019We attended Phage Futures 2019 at the end of January, and now present our full recap of the event.
- What's it like to help with phage crowdsourcing?To understand what it's like to take part in phage crowdsourcing, we interviewed five labs who've contributed phages on behalf of a patient.
- Studying phage-host coevolution in the labHow is phage-host coevolution studied in the lab, and what can it tell us?
- Incentives for phage drug developmentA look into government incentives for antimicrobial development, and how they apply to phage therapeutic development.
- Alternatives to patenting phages: trade secrecyIn past issues, we covered what it means to patent something & whether patenting works for phages. In this issue, we dive into an alternative to patenting: trade secrecy.
- Impressions of Phage Futures 2019This week, we attended Phage Futures Congress 2019, which we found to be a huge success!
- Patenting phages, part II: What makes something patentable?Simply having a patent on something doesn’t actually protect your invention. That patent has to actually hold up in court. How is this determined, and what kind of chance do phages stand?
- Breaking down phage patentabilityYou may have heard through the grapevine that “phages can’t be patented”, but several phage patents exist, and biotech and pharma are investing in phage-based therapeutics. What’s the deal?
- Where in the world (and how) can I get phage therapy?People are starting to ask questions about phage therapy. We need your help to put together an FAQ. Do they qualify? How can they get it, and where do they get it?
- New reporting standards for uncultivated viral genomesHave you submitted genome sequences for phages that haven’t been cultured yet? Here’s what you should report if and when you do.
- Capsids in the classroom (and a challenge for 2019)This week, we’re sharing insights from our experience talking to middle school kids about phages, phage therapy, and Phage Directory.
- Tweaking the microbiome with phages: Q&A with BiomX CBO Assaf OronThis week, we bring you a Q&A with BiomX CBO Assaf Oron.
- Belgium’s new brand of phage therapyThis week, we explore Belgium's unique new way of treating patients with phages...