At Phage Australia, we’re scaling up personalized phage therapy. Here’s an overview of the process, to assist other centers in navigating the challenges of running a successful phage therapy (or other bio-based) service.

My experience getting started with the AKTA Flux to make cleaner phages for patients.

I share my process for setting up a new phage-making system in the lab, including making sense of a dizzying array of options, managing overwhelm, and resisting 'optimization creep'.

I share an update on my work toward setting up a new phage-making system in the Iredell lab (part of Phage Australia).

Patients need safe phages, but most regulators don't yet have official positions on what makes a phage batch safe. This week, I share my recent foray into learning about phage quality control and working toward setting up a basic phage QC system in the lab.

Six years ago, just as I was finishing up my microbiology PhD, I stumbled across an opportunity to help a patient. One patient turned into many, and what I used to think was 50 years away — using phages to treat infections — has become my daily work.

Phage production has its quirks, but it’s not the only field trying to reliably manufacture a new biological entity. This week I share learnings from Australia’s annual bioprocessing conference about challenges other fields are facing, and what we might borrow as we prepare phages for the clinic.

This week I talk about how to use qPCR to count phage and bacteria in patients during phage therapy. This is part I of a multipart series.

I continue my 'qPCR for phage therapy' series, sharing how we know if our qPCR worked, what to look for, and how to interpret how much phage/bacteria were in our samples based on the results.

I share learnings from setting up a pipeline for phage production/purification/QC at Phage Australia, and using it to provide phage therapy for our first 3 patients in 2022! Biggest learning: the hardest part about scaling phage therapy has little to do with phages and mostly everything to do with communication and process.

I share ways the Phage Australia lab team has been improving efficiency of its phage therapy system, such as dividing up work, managing expectations, overcommunicating with clinical teams, and setting up solid lab documentation processes to support it all.

What are 'n of 1' clinical trials, how do they compare to compassionate use, and how might they be used for phages? This week Jessica shares musings about this topic, which has been swirling in her brain for a while now…

There's been a few studies lately on phages and neutrophils. Do they help each other? Do they get in each other's way? Who can keep track? This week we take a look at three phage-neutrophil papers and what they found.

This week I highlight a brand new paper out of the Bordenstein lab, out yesterday in Science, that unravels the mechanism by which prophage-encoded proteins control whether Drosophila flies reproduce or not.

It's been almost three months since we launched our State of Phage 2020 Survey! We're excited to show you a snapshot of the data coming in. Today we're focusing on who responded to the survey: where are they from, what's their career stage, and how much phage experience do they have?

We're compiling the results of our State of Phage 2020 Survey, and we're excited to show you a second snapshot of the findings! Today we're focusing on strain collections; which bacterial species are phage labs collecting, how many do they have of each, and where did they get them from?

We're compiling the results of our State of Phage 2020 Survey, and we're excited to show you a third snapshot of the findings! Today we're focusing on phage collections; which phages are labs collecting, how many do they have of each, and where did they get them from?

I share how, as a non-coder, I got ChatGPT to help me make a chatbot that knows everything we've published across 220 Capsid & Tail blog posts (almost every week for the last 4.5 years!), how you can play with it, and how you can build your own!

You may have heard people (especially on Twitter) talking about DeSci, or decentralized science. Here I share my experience diving into LabDAO, a new DeSci initiative enabling science through a lab space/experiment sharing network.

Phage Directory started because Jan (a 'tech person') saw how his skills could help fix inefficiencies in my field: phage biology. Now, more people like Jan are getting excited to focus on solving problems in science/biology/biotech (accelerated by COVID and the new Web3/blockchain era). Some are even looking at Phage Directory as an example of what success can look like!

Save your sanity and be a lab notebook minimalist like me

A new series on what works for me, from lab to writing