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LytPhage Presents at 1st Pitch Life Sciences-Philadelphia

Posted in Advanced Drug Manufacturing Technology, Bioengineering & reverse engineering design, Clinical Diagnostics, Conference Coverage with Social Media, Health Economics and Outcomes Research, Infectious Disease & New Antibiotic Targets, Innovations, Patents, Translational Research, tagged Bacteriophage, bioangel, biotech startup, Clostridium difficile, Infectious Diseases, vancomycin on September 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »

LytPhage Presents at 1st Pitch Life Sciences-Philadelphia-September 16, 2014

LytPhage presented at Mid-Atlantic BioAngels 1st Pitch Life Sciences in Philadelphia Tuesday Sept. 16, 2014.

LytPhage is a new biotech company using novel bioengineering to develop therapeutics to address the worldwide crisis of antibiotic resistant organisms. They are developing a treatment for vancomycin resistant systemic infections with their platform, which can be adapted for other problematic organisms. LytPhage is a spin-out form Temple University.

The overall goal is to use genetically modified bacteriophage (bacterial viruses) as an antimicrobial therapy against drug-resistant strains. Their genetically modifed viruses are only lytic, meaning they result in cell death of the host but do not integrate in the host DNA. In additon preliminary studies using mainly clinical isolates have shown good efficacy against most drug-resistant strains found in common hospital infections like Clostridium difficile colitis. The presenters noted that bacteriophage therapy had successfully been used in Europe but no approved therapy in US

For more information about this meeting please see posting on this site

1st Pitch Life Science- Philadelphia- What VCs Really Think of your Pitch

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Genomics of Bacterial and Archaeal Viruses

Posted in Biological Networks, Gene Regulation and Evolution, Computational Biology/Systems and Bioinformatics, Disease Biology, Small Molecules in Development of Therapeutic Drugs, Genome Biology, Infectious Disease & New Antibiotic Targets, International Global Work in Pharmaceutical, Molecular Genetics & Pharmaceutical, Pharmaceutical Industry Competitive Intelligence, Population Health Management, Genetics & Pharmaceutical, Scientist: Career considerations, Technology Transfer: Biotech and Pharmaceutical, tagged Archaea, bacteria, Bacteriophage, Biology, DNA, Nucleic acid sequence, Tufts University School of Medicine, virus on March 4, 2013| 1 Comment »

Genomics of Bacterial and Archaeal Viruses

Reporter: Larry H Bernstein, MD, FCAP
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/?p=10187/Genomics of Bacterial and Archaeal Viruses/

Genomics of Bacterial and Archaeal Viruses: Dynamics within the Prokaryotic Virosphere

M Krupovic, D Prangishvili, RW Hendrix, and DH Bamford

Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews Dec. 2011; 75(4): 610–635 http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/MMBR.00011-11

Over the past few years, the viruses of prokaryotes have been transformed in the view of microbiologists from simply being convenient experimental model systems into being a major component of the biosphere. They are

the global champions of diversity,
they constitute a majority of organisms on the planet,
they have large roles in the planet’s ecosystems,
they exert a significant—some would say dominant—force on
the evolution of their bacterial and archaeal hosts, and
they have been doing this for billions of years,
possibly for as long as there have been cells.

This transformation in status or, rather, our expanded appreciation of the importance of these viruses in the biosphere is due to a few significant developments in both understanding and technology.

(i) It has become clear that the population sizes of these viruses are astoundingly large. This realization grew out of electron microscopic enumerations of tailed phage virions in costal seawater, and numerous measurements in other environments have been made since then. A current estimate based on these measurements is that

there are 1031 individual tailed phage virions in the global biosphere—
enough to reach for 200 million light years if laid end to end—and measurements of population turnover suggest that
it takes roughly 1024 productive infections per second to maintain the global population.

(ii) Advances in DNA sequencing technology have led to dramatic qualitative improvements in how we understand the

genetic structure of viral populations,
the mechanisms of viral evolution, and
the diversity of viral sequences.

The majority of newly determined gene and protein sequences of these viruses has no relatives detectable in the public sequence databases, and

analysis of metagenomic data provides strong evidence that
there is more genetic diversity in the genes of the viruses of prokaryotes
- than in any other compartment of the biosphere.

(iii) Facilitated by these conceptual and technical advances, studies of bacterial and archaeal viruses as important components of global biology have flourished. These viruses are revealed as important players in

carbon and energy cycling in the oceans and other natural environments and
as major agents in the ecology and evolution of their cellular hosts.

(iv) The isolation and characterization of new viruses have accelerated. This has been especially important for the archaeal viruses, where the discovery of new viruses and of new virus types had lagged behind bacteriophage discovery. For the bacteriophages, the isolation of newly discovered viruses has helped improve the still extremely sparse coverage of sequence diversity and the narrow phylogenetic range of hosts represented by current data.

(v) High-resolution structures determined

for capsid proteins and other virion proteins,
together with information about virion assembly mechanisms,
have allowed surprising inferences about ancestral connections among genes whose DNA sequences and encoded protein sequences
- have diverged to the point that they are no longer detectably related.