Funding, Deals & Partnerships: BIOLOGICS & MEDICAL DEVICES; BioMed e-Series; Medicine and Life Sciences Scientific Journal – http://PharmaceuticalIntelligence.com
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
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
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.
2012pharmaceutical
Amandeep Kaur
Aashir Awan, Phd
Abhisar Anand
Adina Hazan
Alan F. Kaul, PharmD., MS, MBA, FCCP
alexcrystal6
anamikasarkar
apreconasia
aviralvatsa
David Orchard-Webb, PhD
danutdaagmailcom
Demet Sag, Ph.D., CRA, GCP
Dror Nir
dsmolyar
Ethan Coomber
evelinacohn
Gail S Thornton
Irina Robu
jayzmit48
jdpmd
jshertok
kellyperlman
Ed Kislauskis
larryhbern
Madison Davis
marzankhan
megbaker58
ofermar2020
Dr. Pati
pkandala
Rosalind Codrington, PhD
ritusaxena
Rick Mandahl
sjwilliamspa
Srinivas Sriram
stuartlpbi
Dr. Sudipta Saha
tildabarliya
vaishnavee24
zraviv06
zs22