Fighting bacteria with viruses — with Jessica Sacher

Don't look now, but there are bacteriophages on your shoes. And if you scraped off a sample and sent them to a phage biology lab, one strain of them might turn out to be a natural, targeted predator for an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection that a surgery patient has been fighting for the past year.

I'm joined this week by Jessica Sacher, a Stanford phage biologist, cofounder of Phage Directory, and founding research staff at Phage Australia. Jessica has spent more than a decade studying natural viruses that kill bacteria, trying to bring century-old ‘phage’ therapy into modern medicine—with everything from basic-science research to personally hand-preparing treatments for individual patients.

We talk about why this promising therapy got written off as "commie science," what fraction of PhD-thesis research samples just happen to cure an antibiotic-resistant infection, where they sell over-the-counter phage medication that's developed like a sourdough starter, and what it'll take to design clinical trials when every treatment is personalized to a particular patient.

Full transcript at https://developmentandresearch.bio/episode/jessica-sacher/