Phage Australia
Our journey to treating Dhanvi
In 2019, 7-year-old Dhanvi was in a car accident. The bones in her legs became infected with bacteria. Antibiotics didn't help, and she faced amputation
How does phage therapy work?
If the right phage can be found in time, phages can be used like antibiotics to cure life-threatening bacterial infections
Our approach to phage therapy
How we’re tackling phage therapy’s decades-long paradox using a personalised clinical trial
Join our Network
Are you at a hospital in Australia? Are you with a patient advocate group? Do you run a phage lab, even outside of Australia? We’d still love to work with you.
Phage Australia is bigger than Australia! We currently work with Phage Canada and phage teams in the UK to expand the reach of STAMP-regulated phage therapy.
Biobank
Registering your phages and bacterial strains speeds up our phage therapy efforts.
Iredell Lab
- Lab Name
- Iredell Lab
- URL
- https://criticalinfection.com/
- Contact Name
- Jan Zheng
- Contact Email
- biobank@phageaustralia.org
- Organization
- Westmead Institute for Medical Research
- City
- Sydney
- State
- NSW
The Bacteriophage Bank of Korea
- Lab Name
- The Bacteriophage Bank of Korea
- URL
- http://www.phagebank.or.kr/intro/eng_intro.jsp
- Contact Name
- Heejoon Myung
- Contact Email
- phagebank@lysentech.com
- Organization
- Lysentech, Hankuk Univsersity of Foreign Studies
- State
- Korea
EMG lab
- Lab Name
- EMG lab
- URL
- Environmental Microbial Genomics – Institut for Plante- og Miljøvidenskab - Københavns Universitet
- Contact Name
- Lars H. Hansen
- Contact Email
- lhh@plen.ku.dk
- Organization
- University of Copenhagen
- City
- Copenhagen
- State
- Denmark
Blog Posts
In the News
Bacteriophages (phages) are viruses with the ability to infect bacteria, and they have recently attracted substantial attention as potential therapeutic alternatives or adjuvants to antibiotic therapy due to the global urgency of antimicrobial resistance. Antibiotics have been the clinical ‘gold standard’ for treating bacterial infections, and their pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics (PK/PD) have been extensively investigated over the past decades. Unfortunately, there has been a significant lack of research on the PK/PD of phage therapy, severely hindering its clinical translation. Recognising this as a major hurdle, excellent reviews summarising the available literature on phage PK/PD have been published over recent years. The aim of this present narrative review is to discuss the PK/PD challenges with the clinical translation of phage therapy and address the voids that need to be filled.
Staphylococcus aureus is a leading cause of bacteraemia and endocarditis in which intraclonal genetic variation, but not true polyclonal bacteraemia, is well documented. We describe a case of 36-year-old women with simultaneous and persistent bacteremia from two strains of Staphylococcus aureus that probably would have gone unrecognised because of the identical antibiotic profiles if had we not used bacteriophage susceptibility (“phage typing”) to further characterise the strains. In this patient, the dual bacteraemia was followed months later by another bacteraemia that likely would have been deemed a relapse of the original infection, except that we used similar methods to identify a third and unrelated strain. Our patient eventually responded well to antibiotics, and her bacteriophage therapy probably contributed little to that recovery. However, bacteriophage therapy required that we identify the strain of S. aureus causing her bacteraemia, and that requirement led directly to our identification of dual strains with identical antibiotic susceptibilities. Because of this experience, we alert other clinicians to the possibility of polyclonal infections with S. aureus. When bacteraemia is suspected, clinicians often pick a single colony or a few colonies from the original culture because prompt identification of the organism is critical and this practice provides a faster turnaround time. We caution that it might not identify different strains with different antibiotic sensitivities when polyclonal infections are present.
