Reinventing the fight against bacteria, one phage at a time.

Viruses Behave Totally Differently in Space and It Could Help Us Treat Superbugs on Earth Bacteria and viruses are locked in a slow motion battle aboard the ISS that looks nothing like life on the ground. The International Space Station photographed above the Earth from the space shuttle Atlantis in 2011. Credit: NASA Bacteriophages  — viruses that prey on bacteria — are nature’s tiniest predators. On Earth, their lives are shaped by an ordinary physics engine we rarely think about: gravity-driven mixing. Liquids circulate, nutrients move, microbes bump into one another, and phages stumble into susceptible cells. Take gravity away and you get a microbial world where particles drift,  convection  fades, and the odds of a productive collision change. Yet even in the near-weightlessness of the International Space Station (ISS), viruses called phages can still infect bacteria, a new  PLOS Biology  study reports . But microgravity seems to change the pace and rules o...

Golden Gate method enables rapid, fully-synthetic engineering of therapeutically relevant bacteriophages Simplified bacteriophage design and synthesis to propel long-obstructed bacteriophage research in new PNAS study from New England Biolabs® and Yale University                   Bacteriophages have been used therapeutically to treat infectious bacterial diseases for over a century. As antibiotic-resistant infections increasingly threaten public health, interest in bacteriophages as therapeutics has seen a resurgence. However, the field remains largely limited to naturally occurring strains, as laborious strain engineering techniques have limited the pace of discovery and the creation of tailored therapeutic strains. Now, researchers from New England Biolabs (NEB®) and Yale University describe the first fully synthetic bacteriophage engineering system for Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an antibiotic-resistant bacterium of global concern, in a ...

NexaBiome accelerates development of novel diabetic foot treatment with Scottish Enterprise funding UK biotechnology company NexaBiome Life Sciences Ltd has received continued funding from Scotland's national economic development agency, Scottish Enterprise, to accelerate its breakthrough bacteriophage technology for the treatment of diabetic foot infections (DFIs). The funding is the second tranche of support in a £125k project to support the development of a stable, room-temperature wound dressing aimed at treating DFIs, a severe complication of diabetes that has been exacerbated by drug-resistant bacteria and which can lead to amputation or death. The grant supports NexaBiome’s commitment to developing alternative medicines to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Dr. Jason Clark, Chief Executive Officer at NexaBiome, said: “We’re grateful for Scottish Enterprise’s ongoing support. This will help accelerate the development of our formulation for DFIs, which has the potential to...