Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) in Phage Therapy with Dr. Frenk Smrekar, founder and CEO at JAFRAL

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

Phage genome annotation is a critical component in phage therapy to help us understand the functions of phage genes and ensure efficacy of phages. In this week's phage therapy today, we sit down with the founder and CEO at Rime Bioinformatics Dr. Antoine Culot to discuss the current challenges, regulations and opportunities in using bioinformatic tools to specifically target phage therapy needs. Let's give it a listen..... Find out more about Rime Bioinformatics and their services @https://rime-bioinformatics.com

In today's show, we sit down with Dr. Steffanie Strathdee, whose family story of saving her husband's life from a life-threatening superbug infection using phage therapy really inspired a lot of the most important works today in the phage therapy field. Listen to today's episode to learn about her story. Among her many roles, as the director of the 'Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics' at UC San Diego, Dr. Strathdee also get to help us understand the scope of power we have today in our field and much more... Dr. Strathdee and her husband shared their story in their memoir "The Perfect Predator: A Scientists's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug", which can be found @ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H282CPT?ref=KC_GS_GB_US Their story has also recently been spread nationwide through CNN @https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/08/health/phage-superbug-killer-life-itself-wellness/index.html Find out more about UCSD IPATH and their resource @https://medschool.ucsd.edu/som/medicine/divisions/idgph/research/center-innovative-phage-applications-and-therapeutics/people/Pages/default.aspx Happy listening!

How do bacteriophages shape bacterial fitness and how does it lead to the resensitiization of antimicrobials? In today's show, we are delighted to have Dr. Jeremy Barr from Monash University to talk about his research and his recent republication on Nature Microbiology "Bacteriophage-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii are resensitized to antimicrobials". Maybe it's time for us to have a better understanding of the key pathogens' cellular biology and defense mechanisms to combat the challenge of AMR.  You can find the article @https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00830-7 and find out more about Dr. Barr's research @https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Ebx3KmEAAAAJ&hl=en  Find out about Australia's collaborative effort on phage therapy @ https://phageaustralia.org