We bank these phages and classify them by type of infection and the institution they come from. TAILΦR was founded because we believe in a personalized, rapid approach whereby we use phage developed specifically against the patient’s strain as a means to their therapy. We need medicines that adapt and change quickly to hit that moving target. When it comes to treatment, bacteria are a microbial “moving target”. Evolutionary adaptation drives bacterial resistance to all of our drugs, vaccines, and engineering controls. This idea explains the modern antibiotic resistance crisis. Penicillin has the same structure it had when it was first synthesized in the 1940s. We strive to foster a collaborative environment between academia, industry, and medicine.īacteria change, but our medicines, like antibiotics, do not. TAILΦR (Tailored Antibacterials and Innovative Laboratories for phage (Φ) Research) is an academic, Baylor College of Medicine initiative dedicated to phage research, therapy, and technologies. How is this going to change the state of phage therapy in the US today? Can you talk about the TAILΦR project at BCM. If we can harness this evolvability in a specific way, what we sometimes call in the lab “directed evolution”, we can adapt phage as quickly to their bacterial hosts as bacteria can adapt to our current antibiotics, if not faster. This is why phage research is so intellectually appealing – they compete in the original predator-prey dynamic – an evolutionary experiment as old as life itself that you can observe in real time and, like bacteria, they mutate and evolve too. In a population of billions of cells, theoretically only one is needed to overcome an antibiotic or vaccine once it arises, natural selection chooses it to dominate the new ecological landscape. Their ability to change, essentially mutate, is their greatest attribute. The reason we keep having trouble with bacteria is not because we cannot come up with ways to stop them, it’s because they evolve to overcome these ways so fast. We remain in awe of the adaptability and evolvability of all life forms, especially microbes. Really, our interest grew as the antimicrobial resistance crisis grew. But only recently, the last five years or so did we ramp up our efforts. To some degree, we have always been interested in this topic.
How did you first get involved with phage research? What do you find most interesting about phages or phage therapy?
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