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

As a serial entrepreneur, Johan Wikstroem founded a phage therapy company recently with one goal in mind, to treat his own Mycobacteroides abscessus infection and more people with conditions like himself. Listen in to this week's "Phage Therapy Today" and find out more about how our guest transitioned from tech to biotech and overcoming the hurdles in this process.

Find out more about tolka.ai @https://tolka.ai

In this week's Phage Therapy Today, we get back together with Dr. Gina Suh to learn about her recent progress and experience in the application of phage therapy at Mayo Clinic. If you are interested in learning about the first case of phage therapy in treatment of a cardiology case, leading to a successful heart transplant after the clearing of heavy bacterial burden, give it a listen to today's episode! Hear out about how things are progressing in the field and where are we going next from Gina's first hand experience.

As more phage-based and phage-derived products and therapies emerge, swift decisions and strategies in drug development, designing clinical trials and approaching regulatory agencies come in handy. In this week's Phage Therapy Today, we sit down with Dr. Carrie-Lynn Langlais Furr, coming from a solid bacteriophage science background and coming with more than a decade's experience in phage related drug development and regulatory affairs, to talk about her advise on how to navigate these waters. Let's give it a listen to what some potential challenges lay ahead of us and how to be better prepared. 

Find out more about Dr. Furr and her company Bacteriophage & Drug Development Consultants (BDDC) @https://www.linkedin.com/in/bacteriophage-and-drug-development-consultants/

Happy Tuesday everyone and welcome back to phage therapy today! Listen in to today's episode, we sit down with Dr. Ben Temperton, Professor at University of Exeter and founder of Citizen Phage Library. Learn about Dr. Temperton's journey and his vision for how citizen phage library can help shape the phage therapy landscape. 

Let's give it a listen! 

Find out more about the 'Citizen Phage Library' @https://www.citizenphage.com

Find out more about Dr. Temperton's research and work @https://tempertonlab.github.io/about/ben/

Wish you all a great thanksgiving! 

Phage killing bacteria is cool but understanding phages and engineering their molecular biology is just another level cool. In today's 'Phage Therapy Today' podcast, we sit down with Dr. Steven Theriault, a proud Canadian, a scientist, and an entrepreneur from Cytophage Tehnologies Inc. Listen to the episode and learn about how he is building and expanding businesses in both clinical and agricultural markets across the globe, while constantly innovating on phage technologies and having fun.

You can find out more about Cytophage Technologies Inc. @https://cytophage.com