Phage Australia

Phage Australia

A national network of phage researchers and clinician scientists who aim to professionalise phage therapy as the third major intervention for infectious diseases.
28+
Patients treated
75+
Investigators and Partners
16+
Treatment Sites
2344
Registered phages
5397
Registered strains

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

Read about Dhanvi →

Dhanvi cover

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

How does it work? →

3D phage rendering

Our approach to phage therapy

How we’re tackling phage therapy’s decades-long paradox using a personalised clinical trial

Our approach →

WIMR aerial shot

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

Explore the biobank
Register your Biobank
We are now ready to register all Phage Australia node biobanks!
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
Registered Strains: 5396
Strain genera: Achromobacter (2), Acinetobacter (103), Aeromonas (4), Chryseobacterium (2), Citrobacter (231), Cupriavidus (1), Cupriviadus (1), Edwardsiella (1), Elizabethkingia (1), Enterobacter (837), Enterococcus (21), Escherichia (2477), Hafnia (7), Klebsiella (1106), Kluyvera (3), Morganella (26), Pantoea (3), Proteus (49), Providencia (4), Pseudomonas (316), Raoultella (1), Salmonella (9), Serratia (117), Shigella (26), Staphylococcus (43), Stenotrophomonas (4)
Registered Phages: 342
Phage host genera: Enterococcus (7), Escherichia (85), Klebsiella (48), Pseudomonas (30), Staphylococcus (47)
View Registered Phages (342)
View Registered Strains (5396)

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
Registered Strains: 0
Strain genera:
Registered Phages: 1964
Phage host genera: Acinetobacter (118), Campylobacter (102), Cronobacter (86), Enterobacter (199), Enterococcus (19), Escherichia (357), Klebsiella (102), Lactobacilus (7), Pectobacterium (1), Pseudomonas (249), Salmonella (229), Serratia (25), Shigella (107), Staphylococcus (8), salmonella (273), shigella (82)
View Registered Phages (1964)
View Registered Strains (0)

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
Registered Strains: 1
Strain genera: Salmonella (1)
Registered Phages: 38
Phage host genera: Enterrococcus (1), Escherichia (24), Pseudomonas (6), Salmonella (6), acinetobacter (1)
View Registered Phages (38)
View Registered Strains (1)

Blog Posts

In the News

If you're in the network, add your Phage Australia news here
Publication | June 16, 2023
News | June 03, 2023
Phage Therapy PK/PD Review Paper

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.

Clinical Microbiology and Infection
Phage Therapy Polyclonal Bacteraemia Staphylococcus aureus

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.

Annals of Internal Medicine
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Who we are

We are a network of clinicians, researchers, microbiologists, and engineers passionate about tackling the next existential threat to humanity

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