Happy Tuesday Everyone and Welcome back to the latest episode of Phage Therapy Today!

Phage science is awesome, the business is growing, and the numbers on paper are looking great. But along with this excitement, we must realize the end goal is to save lives and improve clinical outcomes. The truth is phage therapy is still very far from accessible to the general public today.

There are many reasons for this, and the lack of information and community available to the general public and doctors is definitely a major contributing factor. Because phage therapy is not yet the standard of care and is considered experimental, doubt from doctors and patients can delay the start of phage therapy treatment.

In this week’s episode, Christopher Schaffer shares his story of how he saved his own life by going on a journey where he took the lead in finding a cure for his MDR infection. He did tons of research on his own, reaching out to all the help he could get, and navigating through difficult situations related to Covid and the Ukraine war. The amount of courage, determination, and faith he demonstrated is awe-inspiring. Let’s give it a listen!

To bridge this gap, I am unofficially announcing the formation of a nonprofit organization led by Christopher Schaffer, Professor Irene Chen, and myself. Our aim is to create a community for patients and doctors looking into phage therapy. The goal is to provide information on success stories from past patients to build trust in phage therapy, connect with therapeutic resources, and provide support to all going through AMR infections, ensuring you are not alone out there.

As a first step, I would like people to re-post, @doctors, and patients who require phage therapy resources to join our Discord group at: https://discord.gg/gtrX5ZpE. We would also like everyone else passionate about phage therapy to join and comment in the “volunteers” and “general” channels only.

Welcome back to Phage Therapy Today! As phage therapy is becoming global, so are funding opportunities. In this week's episode, our guests, Dr. Mercedes Gonzalez from Incubator for Antibacterial Therapies in Europe (INCATE) and Dr. Gregorio Iraola, at Kinzbio sat down with us to talk about these funding opportunities and how startup companies can benefit from them. Let's give it a listen!

Learn more about INCATE organization and opportunities at: https://www.incate.net/about-us/

Find out more about Kinzbio's Jumbo Phage technology at: https://www.kinzbio.com/

INCATE is organizing the 8th AMR Conference & phage workshop: https://amr-conference.com/program-2024/

Standardizing the phage therapy industry through processes like clinical trails is the way to go . One of the fundamental steps to broader use of phage therapy and successful therapy is producing phages following Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and JAFRAL is the leader in this field. In today's show we sit down with JAFRAL's founder and CEO Dr. Frenk Smrekar, a visionary who has been working on the development of GMP for bacteriophages throughout his whole career. Let's give a listen to his journey of founding the company and his observation and thought on the phage therapy field development through a GMP perspective.

Learning more about JAFRAL @https://jafral.com

A review paper on GMP in Phage Therapy by https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2020.01161