In Australia, we're starting a new clinical trial (phageaustralia.org) for phage therapy, funded by the Australian Medical Research Future Fund: https://www.hea

In Australia, we're starting a new clinical trial (phageaustralia.org) for phage therapy, funded by the Australian Medical Research Future Fund: https://www.health.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/medical-research-future-fund https://www.health.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/medical-r... We're just gearing up with a team distributed across Aus that tackles the clinical, biology and data/engineering side (this is my job). This clinical trial is a bit different from trad drug discovery, since this clinical trial assesses the entire PROCESS of: (1) sourcing the phage (2) testing the phage's effectiveness against a patient's bacteria (3) manufacturing the phage to be safe for the patient/indication. We're not trialling a phage itself, like most active phage therapy clinical trials out there right now. We're emphasizing the "therapy" aspect, of collecting data on the phage, bacteria, and measuring immune reaction in the patient to figure out what works, what doesn't work, and most importantly safety. Phages are interesting because we can "train" them to work specifically for each patient's infection, and this is much more complex than just throwing antibiotics at a wall. In essence, effective and large scale phage therapy is a data problem — we need to figure out why a phage works (or doesn't work) for a specific bacteria and indication first. (How will a phage respond to pseudomonas in the lungs? How will it work in the gut? On the skin? etc.). We also need to know what phages will work in combination with antibiotics, because most doctors will want to keep using antibiotics. But ideally, we want to be able to predict what phages will work in a patient, so we can just prep and manufacture those ahead of time, and have some amount of certainty that given our data this will work. There are tons of phage therapy clinical trials going on, including from places like UCSD, Mayo Clinic in the US, in Portugal, Israel, Belgium. Most of these aren't trialling the process itself like Phage Australia though — they're trialling the phage itself, or a combination (a phage cocktail)... And there's more countries like Canada and the UK getting interested in it as well. Some other places doing cool phage stuff right now: - https://www.biomx.com/our-pipeline/ https://www.biomx.com/our-pipeline/ - https://www.armatapharma.com/ https://www.armatapharma.com/ - http://technophage.pt/2020/ http://technophage.pt/2020/ - Felix: https://www.cff.org/news/2022-03/cf-foundation-awards-1-million-felix-biotechnology-develop-novel-phage-therapy https://www.cff.org/news/2022-03/cf-foundation-awards-1-mill... - https://www.aphage.com/science/case-studies/ https://www.aphage.com/science/case-studies/ - http://www.yalephagecenter.com/ http://www.yalephagecenter.com/ - https://medschool.ucsd.edu/som/medicine/divisions/idgph/research/center-innovative-phage-applications-and-therapeutics/Pages/default.aspx https://medschool.ucsd.edu/som/medicine/divisions/idgph/rese... (Steffanie Strathdee's project) - Mayo Clinic: https://www.mayo.edu/research/clinical-trials/cls-20512857 https://www.mayo.edu/research/clinical-trials/cls-20512857 - TAILOR at the Baylor College of Medicine: https://www.bcm.edu/research/research-centers/tailor#:~:text=TAILOR%20provides%20personalized%20solutions%20for,attributes%20for%20your%20unique%20applications https://www.bcm.edu/research/research-centers/tailor#:~:text.... - Queen Astrid Military Hospital in Belgium: https://phage.directory/capsid/phage-futures-jean-paul-pirnay https://phage.directory/capsid/phage-futures-jean-paul-pirna... -