The country’s first translation research center, opened last year at the University of California, San Diego, is currently planning two clinical trials, including one for patients with cystic fibrosis. Since June, however, the girl has received a three-phase cocktail from Hatfill laboratory, two of which have been genetically modified to better attack her bacteria. She will enroll 30 patients, probably starting later this year, and test the phages against isolated pseudomonas by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Texas. In January, Johnson & Johnson signed a $818 million contract with Locus Biosciences for the development of Crispr phages for the treatment of lung infections. This success gives hope that the promising field of synthetic biology can revitalize the ancient Soviet science of phagotherapy to give doctors a powerful new weapon against superbacteria. The science has come a long way since Felix d’Herelle first treated Parisian children in 1919 with a he phage isolated from the soldier’s chair in his service at the Pasteur Institute. For the first time, scientists developed bacteriophages to help a sick child recover from a deadly infection. “At first, we were excited to have two more species that we could experiment with in our phages,” says Hatfull. But when the search for “your” team of viral predators with an inclination towards Mycobacterium abscessus found promising clues in the back of the library, the research was developed for young researchers in “your” laboratory. But with an estimated 1 billion phages that have never been catalogued in libraries like Hatfull’s and tracking their bacterial prey in soil, water, and air, there is still much to learn. “This is the same method we’ve used to evaluate antibiotics for 80 years,” explains Robert “Chip” Schooley, who leads the UCSD study and also advises the Hatfill group. As part of these efforts, the organization says the organization is conducting research on the safety and effectiveness of pagoda therapy. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation recently pledged $100 million to better identify, prevent and treat chronic lung infections, which often become resistant to antibiotics by escalation. The results of this drastic intervention, published today in Nature Medicine magazine, represent the first use of artificial phages in a human patient.
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