Podcasts about Phage therapy

Are medical advancements closing or widening medical disparities? Eugene Manley, Jr., Ph.D., founder and CEO of the STEMM & Cancer Health Equity Foundation, breaks down why equity is still not completely measurable in clinical trials, what proper representation in studies is, and how certain demographics are at a disadvantage for biomarker tests compared to other groups with host Deborah Borfitz. Their conversation explores whether health equity in cancer trials is different compared to commonly occurring diseases and if basket and umbrella trials may help the move the needle. Plus, the latest news on a pioneering phage therapy service, a unique cardiac arrest pilot study, new primary endpoints for cancer trials, and trial disruptions threatening diversity. Listen and let us know in a review: where do you think our time and resources are most needed for equity? Show Notes News Roundup Compassionate use phage therapy Article in Nature Medicine Press release from Monash University   Sudden cardiac death research  Study in Prehospital Emergency Care News on the University of Cincinnati website New endpoints for cancer trials Consensus paper in The Lancet Oncology News on the Medical University of Vienna website USC and Tempus strategic collaboration News on the Keck School of Medicine of USC website Trial disruptions threaten diversity Article in the Journal of Medical Internet Research Misinterpreting effects of Alzheimer's drugs Research letter in JAMA Neurology News from Brown University School of Public Health  Guest Eugene Manley, Jr., Ph.D., founder and CEO of the STEMM & Cancer Health Equity Foundation The Scope of Things podcast explores clinical research and its possibilities, promise, and pitfalls. Clinical Research News senior writer, Deborah Borfitz, welcomes guests who are visionaries closest to the topics, but who can still see past their piece of the puzzle. Focusing on game-changing trends and out-of-the-box operational approaches in the clinical research field, the Scope of Things podcast is your no-nonsense, insider's look at clinical research today.  

10 million deaths a year.  That is how many people are predicted to die from antibiotic-resistant infections if we do not find new treatments. In today's episode, Professor Martha Clokie and Professor Tim Spector explore the secret gut viruses, known as phages, being studied to fight deadly infection, target cancer cells, and to protect your gut microbiome.  Martha is a world-leading expert on the mysterious phage and, for the last 20 years, has pioneered research to revolutionise the treatment of infections without antibiotics. She explains why antibiotic resistance is a growing global threat, why everyday infections are becoming harder to treat, and how some bacteria are now resistant to every antibiotic available. We explore how the viruses in our gut may help solve this problem, and how scientists may one day use them to deliver highly targeted cancer treatment. By the end of the episode, you'll have some ideas to help support a healthier gut ecosystem and understand how to increase the number of friendly gut viruses that live inside you. The science is still early, but the message is clear: the small choices we make every day are shaping our long-term resilience to disease. If viruses can help protect us from infection rather than cause it, how much of human health are we only just beginning to understand?

David Jernigan 0:15Hello! Dr. Deb 0:16Hi there, sorry for all the confusion. David Jernigan 0:19Oh, no worries, you gotta love it, right? Dr. Deb 0:21Oh, I can’t hear you. David Jernigan 0:23No way, let’s see, my mic must be turned off? Dr. Deb 0:27Hang on, I think it’s me. Let’s see…Okay, let’s try now. David Jernigan 0:40Okay, can you hear me? Dr. Deb 0:42Yep, I can hear you now. David Jernigan 0:43Excellent, excellent. And, how are you today? Dr. Deb 0:48I am good, thank you. How about yourself? David Jernigan 0:50I’m good. Well, it’s good to finally meet you and get this thing rolling. Dr. Deb 0:56Yes, yes, I’m so sorry about that. David Jernigan 0:58That’s alright, that’s alright.So… Dr. Deb 1:01Yeah, go ahead. David Jernigan 1:03So, tell me about yourself before we get going. Dr. Deb 1:06Yeah, so I am a nurse practitioner. I’m also a naturopath. I have a practice here in Wisconsin. I’ve been treating Lyme for about 20 years, so I’m really excited to have this conversation and learn what you’re doing, because it’s so exciting and new. David Jernigan 1:21Well, thank you. Dr. Deb 1:22Yeah, so we treat a lot of chronic illness patients, do some anti-aging regenerative things as well, so… David Jernigan 1:30Yeah, I went to your website and saw you guys are killing it, looks like. Dr. Deb 1:35Yeah. David Jernigan 1:35Got a lot of good staff, it looks like. Dr. Deb 1:37Yeah, we’ve got great staff, great patients, busy practice. We have 5 practitioners, so we have about 15,000 patients in our practice right now. David Jernigan 1:46Well, excellent. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, yeah.So, I’m excited for this discussion. Dr. Deb 1:53Good, me too. So I pre-recorded our intro, so we can just kind of dive right in, and I’ll just ask you to kind of introduce yourself a little bit, tell us a little bit about yourself, and, and then we can just dive right into it. David Jernigan 2:08All right. I’m Dr. David Jernigan, and I own the Biologic Center for Optimum Health in… Franklin, Tennessee, and I’ve been in practice for over 30 years. I shook Willie Bergdurfer’s hand, if anybody knows who that is. It’s kind of infamous now with some of the revelations that have happened about Lyme being a bioweapon and weaponized. But, you know, I’ve been doing this, probably longer than almost anybody that’s still in the business in the natural realm. It chose me. I did not choose Lyme. Matter of fact, there were many times in my career that I was like. You know, cancer’s easier because of the fact that everybody agrees, you know, what we’re dealing with. And in the 90s, it was a whole different reality, where nobody actually understood that you could have Lyme disease and not be coming from New England.You know, so I had actually the first documented case of a Lyme disease, CDC positive.Patient that had never left the state of Kansas before. So they couldn’t say that it wasn’t in Kansas, and so she had actually been, pregnant with… twin boys, and they were born CDC-positive as well, and so it is transmitted across the placenta we know.So, I, you know, the history of how I did all this was, in the 90s, probably 1996, probably, somewhere in there, 97. With this woman, you know, I… if you go into Robin’s pathology books from back then. Which we all used, medical doctors and everybody else studying. you know, there was basically a paragraph about Lyme disease, and on the national board tests, as you recall, it was probably like, what causes, or what is, bullseye rash associated with? And you’d had to guess Lyme disease, of course. Dr. Deb 4:07Female. David Jernigan 4:08But that was, you know, considered to be more a New England illness, and you would never see it anywhere else. But here was this woman. I knew… nothing about Lyme beyond what we had gotten taught in college, which was, like I say, next to nothing. And she would not let me stop feeding me information. I mean, you gotta remember, the internet wasn’t even hardly in existence in those years. I mean, it was brand new. It was supposed to be this information highway, and So I started purchasing, like a lot of doctors do even now, they start purchasing every kind of new supplement that’s supposed to work for bacteria. There was no product in those days that actually was Lyme-specific. I mean, nobody was really dealing with it naturally. It was always a pharmaceutical situation. Dr. Deb 5:04And a very short course at that. David Jernigan 5:06Yeah, 2 weeks of doxy and you’re cured, whether your symptoms are gone or not, which… she’d had the 2 weeks of doxy, and her symptoms and her son’s symptoms were not gone. And so, I absolutely just purchased everything I could find. Nothing would work. I mean, I could name names of products, and you would recognize them, because they’re still out there today. Dr. Deb 5:28Which is. David Jernigan 5:30Kind of a… A sad thing that natural medicine is still riding on these things that have the most marketing. Dr. Deb 5:37As opposed to sometimes the things that actually have the documented research. David Jernigan 5:42Behind it, and I am a doctor of chiropractic medicine, and I specialized all these years in chronic, incurable illnesses of all types. That may sound odd to a lot of people, but doctors of chiropractic medicine are trained just like a GP typically would be. The medical schools, as I understand it, got together, decades ago and said, wow, if all we did was… Crank out general practitioners for the next 10 years, we wouldn’t have still enough general practitioners to supply the demand. Dr. Deb 6:17Right. Everybody in medicine, in medical schools, wanted to be a specialist, because that’s where the money was, and it was… David Jernigan 6:24Easier, kind of, also, to… you know, just focus on one part of the body, and specialize in that. Dr. Deb 6:31Expert in that one area. David Jernigan 6:32So we all now have the same training. We all go through pre-med. We got a bachelor’s degree, I got my bachelor’s degree in nutrition, and through, Park University in Parkville, Missouri. And so, you know, when I ran out of options to purchase, I just used a technology that I developed, which was an advancement upon other technologies, but I called it bioresonance scanning. And I coined the term back in the 90s. It was a way to kind ofKind of like a sensitive test, you know, like you might. Dr. Deb 7:09I wouldn’t. David Jernigan 7:09Of applied kinesiology, then clinical kinesiology, then chiro plus kinesiology, then, you know, you can just keep going with all the advancements that were made. Well, this was an advancement upon those things, so… I developed… I was the first in… in… my known world of doctors to develop a way to detect adjunctively, obviously we can’t say it’s a primary diagnosis. Adjunctively detect the presence of a given specimen. So we could say, thus saith my test. It’s highly likely you have Borrelia burgdurferi. And, but I had to have the specimen on hand to be able to match what I call frequency matching to the specimen. Brand new concept in those days. And so I was able to detect whether or not my treatments were successful or not. This is something even now that’s really difficult for doctors, because antibody tests, even the most advanced ones, it’s still an antibody test. It’s still an immune response to an infection.And accurately, you know, some doctors will slam those tests, saying, well. That doesn’t mean you actually have the infection, that just means your body has seen it before, which is a correct statement, kind of. So being able to detect the presence, and even where in the body these infections are was a way huge advancement in the 90s, for sure it’s kind of funny, I think about a conference I went to, and cuz… I’m kind of jumping ahead. Because I ended up developing my own formula, just for this woman and her children, and it worked. And I was like, wow! Their symptoms were gone, all the blood tests came back negative. In those days, we were using the iGenX. Western blot, eventually. And the, what was called a Lyme urine antigen test. I don’t know if you remember that, because it… Only decades later did I meet, the owner of iGenX, Nick Harris. Dr. Deb 9:17Person. And I was like, whatever happened to the Luwat test? Because I took it off the market after a while. He said, honestly, we lost the antigen and couldn’t find it again. Oh, no. David Jernigan 9:27And so… but that was a brilliant test. It was the actual gold standard in those days. Again, the world… it can’t be understated how different the world was in the 90s. Dr. Deb 9:40Yeah. David Jernigan 9:41Towards natural medicine, even. Dr. Deb 9:44Oh, yeah. We think… we think it’s bad now, but, like, when I started, too, I started in the early 2000s, like, we were all hiding under the radar, like, you didn’t market, we would have never been on social media, we didn’t run ads, we didn’t do any. David Jernigan 10:00Right. Dr. Deb 10:01Because the medical boards were coming for us. David Jernigan 10:04Came after me. Dr. Deb 10:05Because I had the word Lime on my page, my website. David Jernigan 10:10You know, not saying that I treat Lyme. Dr. Deb 10:13Hmm? David Jernigan 10:13Yes Dr. Deb 10:15Just talking about mind. David Jernigan 10:16And it’s funny, because, once I had this formula, it was something… and I trained in Germany, in anthroposophical medicine, and they’ve been trained in herbal… making herbal extracts, making homeopathic remedies in the anthroposophical methodology, and I trained with the Hahnemann versions of homeopathy, which is just slightly different. Yeah. And, so I was well-versed with making some of my own formulas by that time. And so, it was really something that I wrote on the bottle, you know, and I had to call it something, so I called it Borreligin, which is still in existence, and it’s still a phenomenal herbal remedy right now. And to my knowledge, it’s the only frequency-matched herbal formula. Maybe still out there. Because unless you knew how to do my testing, the bioresonent scanning, there was no way to actually do frequency matching. Matter of fact, as a really famous herbalist attacked me online, saying, oh, none of these herbs will kill anything. And I’m like, that wasn’t what I was saying. I was saying, back in those days, I was saying, well, if… what would the body need to address these infections?You know, not, like, what’s gonna kill the infections for the body. Dr. Deb 11:38Right. David Jernigan 11:39Right? So it was a phenomenal way, but the LUAT test was amazing because what you’d do is you would give your treatment, like an MD would give an antibiotic for a week, ahead of time. Trying to increase the number of dead spirochetes showing up in your urine one day out of 3 days urine catch. So you’d wake up in the morning, you’d collect your urine 3 days in a row, and any one of those being positive is a positive. But it was a brilliant test because it wasn’t an antibody test. They were literally counting the number of dead pieces of Lyme bacteria in your urine. I mean, it was pretty irrefutable. So I had a grand slam on the… the Western blot on patients, and I’d also have a grand slam on the LUAT, and their medical doctors would say, oh, that doctor in the lab are probably in cahoots change some lab. Dr. Deb 12:38Of course. David Jernigan 12:39That come in. And I still see that today. You know, it’s like, oh my gosh, the better the tests are getting. There’s still a bias if you do your own research. Well, if you happen to be a doctor who loves research. And you’re a clinician, so you actually treat patients who’s gonna write the research study? Well, of course, the doctor who did the study, well, he’s biased, and I’m like, I still can’t influence lab tests. Well, lab tests aren’t everything. People scream over the internet at me. It’s like, well, a negative lab test doesn’t mean anything. I was like… I get that with the old Western blot testing. Dr. Deb 13:16Right. David Jernigan 13:16The more sensitive tests, which are very close to 100%, Sensitivity, and 100% specificity. So, meaning, like, they can… if you have the infection, they’re gonna find it. Dr. Deb 13:30They’ll find it, yeah. David Jernigan 13:31And if they… if you have the infection, they’re going to be able to tell you exactly 100% correctly what kind of infection it is. Back in those days, you couldn’t, you could just count the dead pieces, which was… Dr. Deb 13:43Yeah. David Jernigan 13:43Significant, but It’s funny, because when medicine does that, you know, mainstream medicine that’s backed by all the nice foundations who donate millions of dollars towards the research. Their negative tests are significant, but if you fund your own, Yours isn’t that significant. Dr. Deb 14:04Right, or what if we call something a seronegative autoimmune disease, like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, because none of the tests are positive, but you have all the symptoms. Here, let me give you this $100,000 a year drug. David Jernigan 14:19Yeah. Dr. Deb 14:19And instead of looking for what might actually be causing the symptoms. That’s all okay, but what we do is not okay. David Jernigan 14:27Right. Yeah, it’s a double standard, and it’s getting better. I want to do… tell the world it is getting better. Some of the dinosaurs are retiring. Dr. Deb 14:36No. David Jernigan 14:37Way for people who are… Are more open-minded to new ideas. But, getting back to that woman, she… that formula that I made just for her and her son, I… She went online. Dr. Deb 14:54Which, I had never been on a news group. David Jernigan 14:58Not even sure I knew what one was, you know? Imagine, I’m kind of that dinosaur that… Cell phones were, like, these really big things with a big antenna sticking out of it, and… Dr. Deb 15:09Nope. David Jernigan 15:10So I thought I was pretty hot stuff, just that I actually had a computer software program that was running my front desk. And even then, it was an Apple IIe computer. Dr. Deb 15:21Right. David Jernigan 15:22Probably be pretty valuable right now if I’d kept it, but… Dr. Deb 15:25Mmm… David Jernigan 15:26It being an antique. But, suddenly people were calling my clinic, because the lady with the twin boys that was well was telling people on these research, I mean, these Lyme disease forums and boards online. And, I started going, oh my gosh, you know, as a doctor, it’s one thing to treat a person in your clinic, it’s a different thing to have your clinic name on the label. Like, we all do, Even now, and you’re supposed to write everything that’s on the label, and… all these guidelines, and I’m like, wow, I need to split this off. I mean, I def… I definitely want to help people, and this is… I was pretty excited about the results we were getting. Pre-treat… Pre-treatment and post-treatment. And, so… that’s where I developed, my nutraceutical business in the 90s called Journey Good Nutraceuticals. My advice to anybody thinking about doing the same thing, don’t put your last name on it. Dr. Deb 16:25– David Jernigan 16:25You know, because anytime negative anything comes out, there goes the Jernigan name, you know, the herbal, you know, there’s just all these, and especially nowadays, with all the bots that are just designed to slam natural medicine. Dr. Deb 16:38Yeah. David Jernigan 16:39And that is out there in a… and just ugly people. Dr. Deb 16:42Or should we just say, people with a different opinion? How’s that? David Jernigan 16:46Yeah. That are being less than supportive. Dr. Deb 16:49But. David Jernigan 16:51It was amazing, because by 1999, I presented my research, my first research, I’d never done research. This is what I would… I would say to a lot of people who go, my doctor did… I don’t know, my doctor doesn’t know what you’re doing, my doctor… I was like going, you know, most doctors don’t do research. They don’t publish anything. Their opinion is their opinion, but they don’t back it up in peer review, right? And so that’s what I always tried to do, was back it up in peer review and publish. And so, in 1999, I presented at the International Tick-Borne Diseases Conference in New York City. I’m telling you, it was like the country boy going to the city, you know, I got my… I got my suit on, and I looked all right, and my booth was wonderful, and all these different things, and it was just a big wake-up call.Because what we had demonstrated… let’s get back to the… and this was what I demonstrated with that first study. was that… A positive LUAC test, that Lyme urine antigen test for my Gen X, was a score of 32. Meaning, one of those 3 mornings urine had 32 pieces in the amount of urine they checked of deadline bacteria spirochetes. Okay? Okay. With antibiotic challenges, a highly positive was a score of 45. Dr. Deb 18:19Wow when I would give one dropper 3 times a day for a week. David Jernigan 18:24Ahead of time, and then do the person’s LUAT test, We were getting scores 100, 200… And at that point, we only had a couple, but we had a couple that were greater than 400. Yeah, dead pieces, where the lab just quits counting. They just said, somewhere over 400, right? Dr. Deb 18:45Yeah. David Jernigan 18:46Which, when the medical system at the conference, you know, I was the only natural doctor in the world that was… had any kind of proof of anything naturally that could outperform antibiotics. Can you imagine? Dr. Deb 18:59Yeah. And… David Jernigan 19:01They were just, oh my gosh, incredulous. They’re like, I’ve given the most… one guy came up to me, and to my face, and he goes, I’ve given the most aggressive antibiotic protocols And I’ve only seen one patient over 100. I was like, that makes this pretty significant, doesn’t it? But, it didn’t just, like, make us take off, because guess what? In Lyme world, if a pharmaceutical antibiotic made you feel horrible. That meant it was working. Dr. Deb 19:28That’s right. We used to, back in the day, if you didn’t herx. And had that horrible die-off reaction, for those of you who don’t know what a herx is, but if we didn’t make you herx, we weren’t doing our job right. David Jernigan 19:40You’re looking for your patients to feel horrible, and sometimes to the level of committing suicide. Dr. Deb 19:46Yes. David Jernigan 19:47So bad. Dr. Deb 19:48Yes. David Jernigan 19:49And I was the first doctor, I think, in the world to start screaming and hollering and saying, stop using the worsening of your patient’s symptoms as a guide to good treatment, because they’re… I wasn’t seeing it with my formulas. Because I was doing a comprehensive program of care. I think I was also one of the first doctors to say, we need to detoxify these people as we’re doing this. And you would sit there and say, well, sure you were. I was like, well, remember, there wasn’t a lot of communication. There wasn’t anybody on the internet saying, do this, do that. And, It was, it was interesting in those days. It was, how do you… How do you help the world heal from these things? That they don’t know they have. So later, I actually had a beautiful booth at a health… a big health expo in Texas, I remember, and I was like, you know, you spend a lot of money on the booth, and… Dr. Deb 20:43Yup. David Jernigan 20:43And you’re thinking about it because you’re funding the whole thing, you say, wow, if I only sell one case, I’ll at least cover my cost. Dr. Deb 20:51Yep. Yeah, you’re great. David Jernigan 20:52And I had this beautiful banner of, like, a blown-up tick’s mouth under microscope. You know those beautiful pictures of, like, all the barbs sticking out, and how they anchor themselves in your skin, and… And, thousand people walking by my booth, and they’re just like, keep walking, because they didn’t know they had Lyme. There was, like, and they had MS, maybe, but they don’t have Lyme, and so they just would keep walking. Nobody even knew. Why would I go to a conference in Texas? And I’m trying to say, no, guys, it’s everywhere. Dr. Deb 21:24Yeah. David Jernigan 21:24And… and everybody, you know, yes, you probably have this, you know, kind of thing. If you’re… if you… are chronically ill, almost, of any kind of way. You know, kind of trying to tell people this was… Again, in Robin’s pathology textbooks, one of the few things that it did tell you about Lyme was that it was called the Great… the New Great Imitator. Because it would imitate up to 200 or more different illnesses. So, it’s been an interesting journey, of… educating people, writing articles, but it was interesting, the lady who I first fixed, Laboratory verified, everything like that, symptoms went away, all that kind of fun stuff. Her children were fine, they’ve been fine for years now. When she went on the newsboards in the Lyme disease support groups, It created a war. Oh my goodness, it was like, how dare you? And, say that something natural might actually help, right? Dr. Deb 22:30Right, exactly. David Jernigan 22:32And, I even had… A… one of those first calls to… with a marketing company at one point, way a long time ago. And the lady got on the phone, the owner of the marketing company goes, I would have blood on my hands if I actually took your clinic on. Yeah, you can’t treat Lyme disease, and… Even the big, big associations that are out there are still largely that way. I mean, they’re getting better, but it’s just like… you know, a lot of the times, it’s herbs are good. Herbs will help. Good, you know, but they’re safe. So, it’s still a challenge to… to… present in mainstream Lyme communities, even. Because there’s this… Fear of doing anything outside of antibiotics. Dr. Deb 23:32Yeah, so let me ask you this. From your perspective. Why do you think so many chronic infections exist these days, like Lyme and the co-infections, Babesia, Bartonella, mold illness? And we talked a little bit about herbs and why they, antibiotics and things like that fail, but let’s talk a little bit about that. David Jernigan 23:53So, it’s fascinating. When I trained in Germany, they said that we, as humanity, has moved away from what they called the inflammatory diseases. You know, in the old days, it was. Lots of high fevers, purulent, pus-generating bacterial infections. And I said, as a society, we have… Dr. Deb 24:14Have shifted from those to what they call cold sclerotic diseases, which are your… David Jernigan 24:21Cancers, your diabetes, your atherosclerosis, your… and they said, we’re starting to see what used to only be geriatric diseases in our children. That’s how bad it’s gotten. We have suppressed fevers, we don’t… we don’t respect the wisdom of the human body. So, you know, the doctors say, step aside, body, I will fix this infection for you with this antibiotic. And so, what we’ve done with the, overuse of antibiotics, and this isn’t me just talking from a natural perspective, this is… Right, it’s everybody around the world is acknowledging. I’ll show you… I could show you a, a presentation, if we can do a screen-sharing situation. Yeah. About the antibiotic situation in the world, because it’s really concerning. But what I would say, and kind of like an advancement forward, is we are seeing mutated bacteria. You know, they talked about… do you remember when they found the Iceman, you know, the… You know, the prehistoric guy that’s… In the eyes, and he had Lyme bacteria. I was like, he had spirochetes, maybe. Dr. Deb 25:33Yeah. David Jernigan 25:33That isn’t a modified, mutated version. That’s just maybe the… Lyme… you know, Borrelia… call it Borrelia something, you know, it’s a spirochete, but what we’re dealing with today. Even under strep or staph, as you know, you know, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, you name it, whatever kind of infection a person has is not the same bacteria that your grandparents dealt with. Dr. Deb 26:01That’s right. David Jernigan 26:32It’s a much mutated, stronger, more resistant to treatment type of thing. So, I think that’s one reason. I think the, It’s great that we’re seeing, you know, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bringing awareness to things that Like it or not, yeah, seed oils do create inflammation, and everyone in the natural realm, as you know. Has been trying to say this for probably how long? Dr. Deb 26:35Yeah, 25, 30 years. 20 years each. David Jernigan 26:48Yes. You know, thank goodness for people like Sally Fallon and her beautiful book, Nourishing Traditions, that started you know, Dr. Bernard Jensen’s books way back in the day, Dr. Christopher’s books way back in the day. Dr. Deb 26:48Damn. David Jernigan 26:49You know, all of them were way ahead of their time, saying, by the way, your margarine is only missing one ingredient from being axle grease. Dr. Deb 26:58Yeah. David Jernigan 26:58I think that was Dr. Jensen saying that at one point, probably 50, 60 years ago, I don’t know. Dr. Deb 27:03Yep. David Jernigan 27:04So, we’ve created this monster. We, we live in a very controlled environment, you know, of 72, 74 degrees at all times, we don’t sweat, we don’t have to work that hard, typically. You know, most of us aren’t out there like our ancestors were, so that’s making us more and more… Move towards the cold sclerotic diseases, of which even Lyme disease is, you know, which… Yes, it has inflammation, yes, but as a presentation, it’s very often associated with some of these Cold sclerotic diseases of mankind that we see now. Dr. Deb 27:46You have it. David Jernigan 27:47Yeah. Dr. Deb 27:48So, tell me, what is phage therapy? David Jernigan 27:52Well, may I show you a cool video? Dr. Deb 27:55Yeah, I’d love that. David Jernigan 27:56I did not make this video, this is just one of my favorites, because it’s from the National Institute of Health. Let’s see if I can just… Click the share screen thing. And get that to pop up. That’s not what I’m looking for, but it’s gonna be soon. Let’s go here… Alright, can you see that? Dr. Deb 28:18Yeah. David Jernigan 28:19Okay. Modern medicine faces a serious problem. Thanks in part to overuse and misuse of antibiotics, many bacteria are gaining resistance to our most common cures. Researchers are probing possible alternatives to antibiotics, including phages. So, bacteriophages, or we like to call them phages for short, are naturally occurring viruses that infect and kill bacteria. The basic structure consists of a head, a sheath, and tail fibers. The tail fibers are what mediate attachment to the bacterial cell. The DNA stored in the head will then travel down the sheath and be injected inside the cell. Once inside the cell, the phage will hijack the cellular machinery to make many copies of itself. Lastly, the newly assembled phages burst forth from the bacterium, which resets their phage life cycle and kills the bacterium in the process. Someday, healthcare providers may be able to treat MRSA and other stubborn bacterial infections using a mixture of phages, or a phage cocktail process would be first to identify what the pathogen is that’s causing the infection. So the bacterium is isolated and is characterized. And then there’s a need to select a phage in a process known as screening of phage that are either present in a repository or in a so-called phage library. That allows for many of the phages to be evaluated for effectiveness against that isolated I don’t know, bacterium. Phages were first discovered over 100 years ago by a French-Canadian named Felice Derrell. They initially gained popularity in Eastern Europe, however, Western countries largely abandoned phages in favor of antibiotics, which were better understood and easier to produce in large quantities. Now, with bacteria like these gaining resistance to antibiotics, phage research is gaining momentum in the United States once again. NIAID recently partnered with other government agencies to host a phage workshop, where researchers from NIH, FTA, the commercial sector, and academia gathered to discuss recent progress. NIH… So… That is… That is what phage therapy in… is. in what I call conventional phage. Let’s see, how do I get out of the share screen? Hope you already don’t see it. Dr. Deb 30:58Yep, at the top, there should just be a button. David Jernigan 31:00I don’t. Dr. Deb 31:00Stop sharing, yeah. David Jernigan 31:01So… Conventional phage therapy, as you just saw, is a lot like what it is that we’re doing, only the difference is they’re taking wild phages from the environment. They’re finding phages anywhere there’s, like, a lot of bacteria. And then they isolate those phages, and like he said, the gentleman at the very end said we put them in a library, and so there are banks of phages that they can actually now use, and One of the largest banks that I know of has about 700 different bacteriophages, or phages. In their bank that they can pull from. Dr. Deb 31:43Wow. Do you want to take a guess? David Jernigan 31:46How many bacteriophages they’ve identified are in the human gut, on average? Dr. Deb 31:52Oh my god, there’s gotta be more… David Jernigan 31:53Kinds, different kinds of phages, how many? Dr. Deb 31:56There’s gotta be millions. David Jernigan 31:57Well… In population, there’s… humongous numbers, numbers probably well beyond the trillions, okay? Hundreds of trillions, quadrillions, maybe, even. But in the gut, a recent peer-reviewed journal article said that there were 32,242 different types of bacteriophages that live naturally in your intestines, your gut. Dr. Deb 32:25Boom. David Jernigan 32:2632,000. Okay, so… If you read any article on phage therapy that’s in peer review, almost every single one in the very first paragraph, they use the same sentence. They go, Phages are ubiquitous in nature. They’re ubiquitous in nature. So my brain, when I find… when all this finally clicked together, and when we clicked together 5 years into my research, I could not get it to work for 5 years. I just kept going. But that sentence really got me going. I was, like, going, you know. If you look at what ubiquitous means, it says if Phages were the size of grains of sand. Like sand on the beach. They would completely cover the earth and be 50 miles deep. How crazy is that? Dr. Deb 33:24Wow. David Jernigan 33:25That’s how many phages are on the planet. There’s so many… they outnumber every species collectively on the planet. So, it’s an impossibility in my mind. I went, huh, it’s an impossibility that… You catching a, a sterile Bacteria, it’s almost an impossibility. Since the beginning of time, phages have been needing to use a reproductive host. And it’s very specific, so every kind of bacteria has its own kind of phage it uses as a reproductive host. Because phages are… and this is a clarification I want to make for people. just like in the old days, we were talking about the 90s, I talked to a veterinarian that had gotten in trouble with the veterinary board in her state. Dr. Deb 34:14Back in the old days. David Jernigan 34:16Because she gave dogs probiotics. And the board thought she was giving the dogs an infection so that she could treat them and make money off of the subsequent infection. Dr. Deb 34:28Oh my god. David Jernigan 34:29Nobody actually had heard of good, friendly bacteria in the veterinary world, I guess she said she had gotten in trouble, and she had to defend herself, that, no, I’m giving friendly, benevolent, beneficial bacteria. Okay, to these animals, and getting good results.So, phages… Are friendly, benevolent, beneficial viruses. That live in your body, but they only will infect a certain type of bacteria. So… What that means is if you have staff.Aureus, you know, Staphylococcus aureus bacteria. That bacteria has its own kind of phage that infects it called a staph aureus phage. E. coli has an E. coli phage. Each type of E. coli has its own phage, so Borrelia burgdurferi has its own Borrelia burgdurferi type of phage, whereas Borrelia miyamotoi alright? Or any of the other Borrelia species, or the Bartonella species, or the… you just keep going, and Moses has its own type of phage that only will infect that type of bacteria. So that’s… You know, when you realize, wow, why are we going to the environment Was my thought. Dr. Deb 35:54Yeah. David Jernigan 34:55Trying to find wild phages and put them into your body, and hopefully they go and do what you want them to do. What if we could trigger the phages themselves that live in your body to, instead of just farming that bacteria that it uses as a host, because what I mean by farming is the phages will only kill 40% of that population of bacteria a day. Dr. Deb 36:20Wow. David Jernigan 36:20And then they send out a signal to all the other phages saying, stop killing! Dr. Deb 36:24It’s like. David Jernigan 36:2560% of the bacteria population left to be breeding stock. It’s kind of like the farmer, the rancher, who… he doesn’t send his whole herd to the butcher. Dr. Deb 36:35Right. David Jernigan 36:36Just to, you know, he keeps his breeding stock. He sends the rest, right? So, the phages will kill 40% of the population every day, just in their reproduction process. Because once there’s so many, as you saw in the video, once the phage lands on top of the bacteria, injects its genetic material into the bacteria, that bacteria genetic engine starts cranking out up to 5,200 phages per bacteria. Dr. Deb 37:06I don’t know who counted all those… David Jernigan 37:08Inside of a bacteria, but some scientists peer-reviewed it and put it out there. that ruptures, and it literally looks like a grenade goes off inside of the bacteria. I wish I’d remembered to bring that video of a phage killing a bacteria, but it just goes, oof. And it’s just a cloud of dust. So, you’re breaking apart a lot of those different toxins and things. So… That’s… That was the impetus to me creating what I did. That and the fact that I looked it up, and I found out that phages will sometimes go… Crazy. I don’t know how to say it. Wiping out 100% of their host. And it could be a trigger, like change in the body’s pH levels, it could be electromagnetically done, you know, like, there’s been documentation of… I think it was, 50 Hz, electricity. Triggering one kind of phage to go… Crazy and annihilate its host population. There’s other ways, but I was, like, going, none of those fit me, you know? It’s not like I’m gonna shock somebody with a… Jumper cable or something to try to get phages to… to do that kind of thing. But the fact that it could be done, they can be triggered, they can switch and suddenly go crazy against their population. But what happens when they kill 100% of their host? The phages themselves die within 4 days. Dr. Deb 38:45Hmm. Because they can’t keep reproducing. David Jernigan 38:47There’s nothing to reproduce them, yeah. Dr. Deb 38:49Yeah. Especially… unless they’re a polyvalent phage, that means a phage that can segue and use. David Jernigan 38:54One or two other kinds of bacteria. To, as a reproductive host. But a lot of phages, if not the majority, are monovalent, which means they have one host that they like to use. And so… Borrelia, so… my study that I ended up doing, and I published the results in 2021, And it’s a small study, but it’s right in there at the high end, believe it or not, of phage research. Most phage research is less than 30 people. In the study. But, we did 26 people.And after one month of doing the phage induction that I invented, which only… Appears to only, induce or stimulate the types of phages that will do the job in your body. I don’t care what kind of phage it is. I don’t care if it’s a Borrelia phage, it may be a polyvalent phage that normally doesn’t use the Borrelia burgdurferi as its number one. Host, but it can. To go and kill that infection. And the fascinating thing is, there was a brand new test that came out at the same time I came out with the idea, literally the same weekend they presented. Dr. Deb 40:1511. David Jernigan 40:15ILADS conference in Boston in 2019. It was called the Felix Borrelia phage Test. So the Felix Borrelia phage test. Because Borrelia are often intracellular, right, they’re buried down in the tissue, they’re not often in the blood that much. And therefore, doing a blood test isn’t really that accurate. But you remember how there’s, like, potentially as many as 5,200 phages of that type erupt from each bacteria when it breaks apart. It’s way easier to detect those phages, because they’re now circulating, those 52, as you saw in the video. 5,200 different phages are now seeking out another Borrelia that they can infect. And so, while they’re out in circulation, that’s easy to find in the bloodstream. So, 77% of the people, so 20 out of 26, were tested after a 2-week period. After only a 4-day round of treatment. Because according to my testing, remember, I can actually test adjunctively to see if I can find any signatures for those kinds of bacteria. And I couldn’t after 4 days, so we discontinued treatment and waited Beyond the 4 days that would allow the phages themselves to die, so we waited about a week and a half.And redid the test. And 77%, so that 20 out of 26 of the people, were completely negative. Dr. Deb 41:50Wow. David Jernigan 41:52Which, you go, well, it’s just a blood test. Well, no, we actually had people that were getting better, like, they’d never gotten better before. We had one woman who was wheelchair-bound, and in two weeks was able to walk, and even ultimately wanted to work for my clinic. I’m just, like, going… Dr. Deb 42:07I didn’t want to write about all that. I wanted to write about the phages. I was like… David Jernigan 42:12article, I probably should have put some of those stories, because, Critics would say, well, you got rid of the infection, maybe, but… Did you fix the Lyme disease? Well, that’s… there’s two factors here that every doctor needs to understand. There’s the infection in chronic illness, there’s the infection, and then there’s the damage that’s been done. Because sometimes I have these people that would come in and say, well, Dr. Jernigan, it didn’t work for me, I’m still in the wheelchair. And I’m like, no, it worked. Repeat lab test over months says it’s gone, it’s gone, it’s gone. It’s like, we would follow, and 88% of the people we followed long-term were still negative, which is amazing to me. Dr. Deb 42:56And then they have to repair the damage. David Jernigan 42:59It’s the damages why you still have your symptoms. And that’s where the doctor has to get busy, right? Dr. Deb 43:06Right David Jernigan 43:06They were told erroneously by their doctor that originally treated them that they’d be well, they’d get out of the wheelchair, if he could actually kill all these infections. Dr. Deb 43:15It’s not true. David Jernigan 43:16Unless it’s caught early. So I love the analogy, and I’ve said it a thousand times.that Lyme disease and chronic infections are much like having termites in the wood of your house. If you find the termites early, then yeah, killing the infection, life goes back to normal, the storm comes and your house doesn’t fall down. But if it’s 20 years later. Killing the termites is still a grand idea. Right. But you have the damage in the wood that needs to be repaired as well. All the systems… when I talk about damage to the wood, I mean, like. All the bioregulatory aspects of the body, how it regulates itself, all the biochemical pathways, the metabolic pathways we all know about, getting the toxins that have been lodged in there for many years, stopping the inflammatory things that have been running crazy. Dealing with all those cytokines that are just running rampant through the body, creating this whole MCAS situation. Which are largely… Dr. Deb 44:21Coming from your body’s own immune cells called macrophages, which are not even… David Jernigan 44:26It’s not… a virus at all, it’s part of the immune system, it’s like a Pac-Man, and research shows that especially in spirochetes. There is no toxin. Now, I wrote 4 books. I think I wrote the very first book on the natural treatment of people with Lyme disease back in the 90s. Why did I write that? Not because I wanted to be famous, it’s a tiny book, actually, the first one was.I was just trying to help people get out of this idea that you will be well when you kill all the bugs. I was saying, it’s… you need to be doing this. If you can’t come to my clinic, at least do this. Try to find somebody that will do this for you. And that ultimately led to a bigger book.as I kept learning more, and I was like, going, well, okay, now at least do this amount of stuff. And you need to make sure your doctor is handling this, this, this, and this. And so, the third book was, like, 500 and something pages long. And then the fourth book was 500 and something pages long, and now they’re all obsolete with the whole phage thing, because this just rewrites everything. Dr. Deb 45:34Yeah. David Jernigan 45:34It’s pretty fascinating. Dr. Deb 45:37Do you think the war on bugs, mentality created more chronic illness than it solved? David Jernigan 45:44Because of the tools that doctors had to use, yes. We’re a minority, we’re still a minority, you and I. Dr. Deb 45:54Yep. Our doctoring… David Jernigan 45:56Methods I never had, and you’d never… maybe you did, but I’d never had the ability to grab a prescription pad and write out a prescription. I had to figure out, how do I get… and this was… and still my guiding thing, is like, how do I identify, number one, everything that can be found that’s gone wrong in the human body. And what do I need to provide that body? Like, the body is the carpenter. That has to do the repair, has to regenerate, has to do everything, has to get… everything fixed right? We can’t fix anything. If you have a paper cut, there isn’t a doctor on the planet that can make that go away. Dr. Deb 46:38Right. David Jernigan 46:39Of their own power, much less chronic illnesses. So, all the treatments are like the screws, saws, hammers, you know the carpenter must be able to use. So a lot of the time, doctors are just throwing an entire Home Depot on top of the carpenter. In the form of, like, bags of supplements, you know, hundreds of supplements, I’ve seen patients walk in my door with two suitcasefuls. And they were taking 70 bottles, 65 to 70 bottles of supplements, and I’d be just like, wow, your carpenter who’s been working for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. He’s exhausted. There’s chaos everywhere, you don’t know where to. Dr. Deb 47:22Starting. David Jernigan 47:22He goes, you want me to do what with all this stuff? Dr. Deb 47:25Yep, I’ve seen the same thing. People… thousands, you know, several thousand dollars a month on supplements, and not any better. But they’re afraid to give up their supplements, too, because they don’t want to go backwards, either, and… there’s got to be a better way on both sides, the conventional side and the alternative side, although you and I don’t say it’s alternative, that’s the way medicine should be, but… David Jernigan 47:48Right. Dr. Deb 47:49We have to have a good balance on both sides. David Jernigan 47:52And I will say, too, in defense of doctors using a lot of supplements, I do use a lot of supplements. Dr. Deb 47:57Yeah, I do too. David Jernigan 47:58but I want to synergize what I’m giving the patient so that the carpenter isn’t overwhelmed and can actually get the job done. Like, everything has to work harmoniously together, so it’s not that… It’s not the number of supplements, and why would you need a lot of supplements? Well, because every system in your body is Messed up. My kind of clientele for 30 years. Our clientele, yours and mine. Dr. Deb 48:25Yeah. David Jernigan 48:26They have been sick, For decades, many of them. Dr. Deb 48:31Yeah. David Jernigan 48:31And if they went into a hospital, they honestly need every department. They need endocrinology, they need their kidney doctor, they need their… They’re a cardiologists, they need a neurologist, they need a rheumatologist. I mean, because none of those doctors are gonna deal with everything. They’re just gonna deal with one piece of the puzzle. And if they did get the benefit of all the different departments they need, yeah, they’d go out with a garbage bag full of stuff, too. Dr. Deb 48:57Hey, wood. David Jernigan 48:58Only, they’re not synergized. They don’t work together. You’re creating this chemistry set of who knows how much poison. And I want to tell your listeners, and I mean, you probably say this to your patients as well. There is a law of pharmacy that I learned eons ago, and it applies to natural medicine, too. Dr. Deb 49:21Yep. David Jernigan 49:22But the law says every drug’s primary side effect Is its primary action. So, if you listen to TV, you can see this on commercials. I love… I love listening to these commercials, because I’m like, wow. let’s… let’s… I don’t want to say I’ve named Brandon. I don’t know if that’s…Inappropriate to name a name brand, but let’s just say you have a pharmaceutical that is for sleep. After they show you this beautiful scene of the person restfully sleeping and everything like that, they tell you the truth. It’s like, this may cause sleepiness… I mean, sleeplessness. Dr. Deb 50:04Yeah. David Jernigan 50:04Found insomnia. Dr. Deb 50:06And headaches, and diarrhea. David Jernigan 50:08All the other things, and if it’s an antidepressant, what does the commercial do after it finishes showing you little bunny foo-foo, jumping through a green, happy people? They tell you, this may create depression, severe depression, and suicidal tendencies, which is the ultimate depression. So, I want everyone to understand you need to figure out what your doctor’s tools are that they’re asking you to take, and they’re wanting you to take it forever, generally in mainstream medicine, right? In the hospitals and everything. They don’t say, hey, your heart has this condition, take this medicine for 3 months, after which time you can get off. Dr. Deb 50:48Yep. David Jernigan 50:49not fixing it, right? So… That, on a timeline, there is a point, if it was truly even fixing anything. That you… it’s done what it should do, and you should get off, even if it’s a natural product. It’s just like. Dr. Deb 51:03Right David Jernigan 51:03It’s done what it should do, and you should get off, but instead. you go through the tree… the correction and out the other side, and that’s where it starts manifesting a lot of the same problems that it had. So, anti-inflammatories, painkillers, imagine the number one side effects are pain inflammation. So, the doctor says, well. If you say, hey, I’m having more pain, what does he do? He ups the dosage. And if he… if that doesn’t work, if you’re still in a lot of pain, which he would be, he changes it to a more powerful thing, right? But it starts the cycle all over again. So when you ask me, it’s like, why are we having so much chronic illness? It’s because of the whole philosophy. is the treatment philosophy of mainstream medicine that despises what you and I do. Because we’re… our philosophy from the start is the biggest thing. It’s like… We’re striving for cure. That dirty four-letter word, cure, we’re not even supposed to use it. And yet, if you look it up in Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, it just means a restoration of health. Remission. Everyone’s like, oh, I’m in remission. I’m like, remission is a drug term. It’s a medical term. Again, look it up in a medical dictionary. It is a pharmaceutical term for a temporary pause Or a reduction of your symptom, but because it’s just… symptom suppression, it will come back. It’s… remission is great, I suppose, in… At the end of, like, where you’ve exhausted everything, because I can’t fix everything, I don’t know about you. Dr. Deb 52:41No, I can’t either, yeah. David Jernigan 52:43you know, on my phone consults, I try to always remind people, as much as I get excited about my technologies gosh, I see so much opportunity to fix you. I always try to go, please understand, I’m gonna tell you what most doctors may not tell you on a phone consultation. I can’t fix everything. Dr. Deb 53:03Yeah. David Jernigan 53:03For all of my tricks, I can’t fix everything. Not tricks, but you know, all my technologies, and all my inventions. Phages, too. They are a tool. You know, antibiotics. I think I wrote a blog one time, it should be on my website somewhere, that says, Antibiotics do not… fix… neurological disease, or… I don’t know, something like that. You know, you’re using the wrong tool. I mean, it does what it does. Dr. Deb 53:32Yeah, you’re using a hammer to do what a screwdriver needs to. David Jernigan 53:35Yeah, you know, it’s like it’s… And yet, you can probably tell her… that you’ve had patients, too, that they go, Dr. Jernigan. My throat was so sore, and as soon as I swallowed that antibiotic. I felt better, and I’m, like, going… How long did it take? Oh, it was immediate! I was like, dude, the gel cap didn’t even have time to dissolve, I mean… Dr. Deb 53:58SIBO. David Jernigan 54:00But, it’s not going to repair the tissues that were all raw. kind of stuff. So, I mean, that ulceration of your throat that’s happening, the inflammation, there’s no anti-inflammatory effect of these things. So, I digress a little bit, but phages, too… I wrote an article that’s on the website, that’s setting healthy expectations for phages, because they want… we can see some amazing things happen, things that in my 30 years, I wish I had all my career to do over again, now having this tool. It’s just that much fun. I… when doctors around the country now are starting to use our inducent formulas, there’s, 13 of them now, formulas. For different broad-spectrum illness presentations. I tell them all the same thing, I was like, you are gonna have so much fun. Dr. Deb 54:53That’s exciting. Women. David Jernigan 54:54Winning is fun, you know? I was like. You know, mainstream medicine may never accept this, I don’t know. I feel a real huge burden, though, to do my best to follow a, very scientific methodology. I’ve published as much as I can publish at this time by myself. I never took money from the… the sources that are out there, because what do they do? They always come… money comes with strings. Dr. Deb 55:22Yes, it does. David Jernigan 55:23I don’t trust… I don’t trust… I mean, if you listen to the, roundtable that Our Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Dr. Deb 55:35Yeah. David Jernigan 55:36On Lyme disease last week the first couple of speakers were, like, pretty legit. I mean, all of them were legit, but I mean, they were, like, senators and congressmen or something like that, I think. And then you have… RFK Jr. himself, who’s legit. Yeah they were fessing up to the fact that, yes, they were suppressing anything to do with Lyme. Dr. Deb 56:00Yeah. David Jernigan 56:00Our… our highest levels of, marbled halls and pillars and… of medicine were doing everything the way I thought they were. They were suppressing me. I was like, how can you ignore the best formulas ever, and still, I think Borreligen, and now, induced native phage therapy are still, I believe, I don’t… I’ve never seen it, I could be wrong. The only natural things that have been documented in a medical methodology. Dr. Deb 56:34Hmm in the natural realm. I mean, all the herbs that we talk about. David Jernigan 56:39You know, there’s one that was really famous for a while, and it said, we gave… so many patients. This product, and other nutritional supplements. And at the end, X number of them were… dramatically better. That’s not research. Dr. Deb 56:57Right. That’s observation. David Jernigan 56:59The trick there was we gave this one thing, and then we gave high-dose proteolytic enzymes, we gave high dose this, we gave high dose that, but at the end of the study, we’re going to point back at the thing we’re trying to sell you as being what did it. Dr. Deb 57:12Which is what we do in all research, pretty much. David Jernigan 57:15Well… Dr. Deb 57:16tried to… David Jernigan 57:17Good guys, I hope. Dr. Deb 57:18Do the way we want, right? In… in conventional… David Jernigan 57:22Yeah. Dr. Deb 57:22Fantastic David Jernigan 57:23Very often, yeah, in conventional medicine, definitely. Yeah. And, it’s kind of scary, isn’t it, how many pharmaceuticals are slamming us with, because they’re… Dr. Deb 57:33Okay. David Jernigan 57:34There’s a new one on TV every day, and there’s. Dr. Deb 57:36Every day, yes. David Jernigan 57:37It’s like, who comes up with these names? They’re just horrible. Dr. Deb 57:40Yeah, you can’t pronounce them. David Jernigan 57:41I want to be a marketing company and come up with some Zimbabwehika, or something that actually they go with, and I’m like, I just made a million bucks coming up with it. I’ll be glad when that’s not on the TV anymore, which… Oh, me too. Me too. Dr. Deb 57:54Dr. Jaredgen, this was really wonderful. What do you want to leave our listeners with? David Jernigan 58:00Well, you know, everyone’s calling for a new treatment. Dr. Deb 58:05Yeah. You bet. David Jernigan 58:08I have done everything I can do to get it out there, scientifically, in peer review, so that if you want to look up my name. Dr. Deb 58:16I published an open access journal so that you didn’t have to buy the articles. Like, PubMed, you have to be a member. If you want to look at a lot of the research, you have to buy the articles. David Jernigan 58:26I’ve done everything open access so that people had access to the information. I honestly created induced native phage therapy to fix my own wife. I mean, I… I was… I used to think I could actually fix almost anything. Gave me enough time. And, I could not fix her. You know, the first 10 years, she was bedridden. Dr. Deb 58:49Wow. David Jernigan 58:50People go, oh, it’s easy for you, Dr. Jernigan, you’re a doctor. Dr. Deb 58:54Oh yeah, right? Yeah. David Jernigan 58:56Oh my gosh, how many tears have been shed, and how much heartache, and how much of this and that. I mean, 90% of our marriage, she was in, bed, just missing Christmas. All the horror stories you hear in the Lime world, that was her, and I could not get her completely well. And, she’s a very discerning woman. I say that in all my podcasts, because it’s. Dr. Deb 59:19Just… David Jernigan 59:16Amazing. It’s like, every husband, I think, should want a wife that’s… Always, right? Not that you surrender your own opinion, but it’s like, it’s… it was literally, I don’t know what, 6 months before the ILADS conference in Boston in 2029… in 2019 that She said, are you going to the ILADS conference this year? And I’m like, I’ve been going for, like, 15, 20 years, however long it’s been going on, and I was like, I’m not gonna go to this one. And, 3 days before the conference, she says, I think you should go. And I go, okay. Like I say, she’s generally right. And that… I bought a Scientific American magazine at the newsstand in the Nashville airport. Started reading a story about phages in that that copped that edition of the Scientific American, and It was a good article, but it wasn’t super meaty, you know. very deep on those, but I just was stimulated. Something about being at elevation. Dr. Deb 1:00:02Yeah. Your own mountains, I don’t know, I get all inspired. David Jernigan 1:00:25And I wrote in the margins and highlighted this and that until it was, like, ultimately, I spent the entire conference hammering this out. And it worked. And it’s been working, it’s just amazing. It’s… We’re over 200 different infections that we’ve… we’ve clinically or laboratory-wise documented. There’s a new test for my GenX called the CEPCR Lyme Panel. like, culture. 64 different types of infections, and I believe right now the latest count is something like 10 for 10 were completely negative. Dr. Deb 1:01:03Wow. David Jernigan 1:01:03These chronically infected people. And so, that hadn’t been published anywhere. So, in my published article, remember I was talking about that 20 out of the 26 were tested as negative for the infection? That doesn’t mean they’re cured, okay? Remember, they’re chronically damaged. That’s how we need to look at it. Dr. Deb 1:01:23funny David Jernigan 1:01:24damaged. You’re not just chronically infected. And, but with 30-day treatment.24 out of the 26 were tested as negative. Dr. Deb Muth 1:01:34That’s amazing. David Jernigan 1:01:35So 92% of the people were negative.Okay? The chances of that happening, when you run it through statistical analysis.The chances… when you compare the results to the sensitivity percentages, you know, the 100% specificity and 92% sensitivity of the…Of the lab testIt’s a 4.5 nonillion to 1 chance that it was a fluke. Isn’t that amazing? Now, nearly… I’m not even sure how many zeros that is, but it’s a lot. Dr. Deb Muth 1:02:08That’s is awesome. David Jernigan 1:02:09Like, if I just said, well, it’s a one in a million chance it was a fluke.Okay.So, lab tests don’t lie. You’re not done, necessarily, just because you got rid of the infections. Now that formula for Lyme has grown to be 90-plusmicrobes targeted in the one formula. So, we figured out we can actually target individually, but collectively, almost like an antibiotic that’s laser-guided to only go after the bad guys that we targeted.So, all the Borrelia types are targeted, all the Babesias, for,the Bartonellas, the anaplasmosis, you name it, mycoplasma types are all targeted in that one formula, because I said.Took my collective 30 years of experience and 15,000 patients.that I would typically see as co-infections and put them into that one formula, so…When we get these tests coming back that are testing for 64, it’s because of that.So, there’s a lot of coolnesses that I could actually keep going and going. Dr. Deb Muth 1:03:15That’s exciting. David Jernigan 1:03:15I love this topic, but I thank you for letting me come on. Dr. Deb Muth 1:03:18Thank you for joining us. How can people find you? David Jernigan 1:03:22Two ways. There’s the Phagen Corp company that is now manufacturing my formulas.That is P-H-A-G-E-N-C-O-R-P dot com. Practitioners can go there, and there’s a practitioner side of the website that’s very beefy with science, and… and all the formulas that were used, what’s inside of all the formulas, meaning what microbes are targeted by each one. Like, there’s a GI formula, there’s a UTI formula, there’s a SIRS formula, there’s a Lyme formula, there’s a central nervous system type infection formula, there’s… And we can keep going, you know, SIBO, SIFO formula, mold formula… I mean, we’ve discovered so many things that I could just keep going for hours, and… Dr. Deb Muth 1:04:05Yeah. David Jernigan 1:04:06About the discoveries, from where it started in its humble beginnings, To now, so… There’s another way, if you wanted to see our clinic website, is Biologics, with an X, so B-I-O-L-O-G-I-X, Center, C-E-N-T-E-R dot com. And, if somebody thinks they want to be a patient and experience this at our clinic, typically we don’t take just Easy stuff. All we see is chronic.Chronic cases from all over the world. Something like 96% of our patients come from other states and countries. And typically, I’ve been close to 90% for my whole career.About 30-something percent come from other countries in that, so… we’ve gotten really good and learned a lot in having to deal with what nobody else knows what to do with. But if you do want to do that, you can contact us. And, if you… If you don’t get the answers from my patient care staff, then I do free consultations. With the people that are thinking about, whether we can help them or not. Dr. Deb Muth 1:05:13Well, that’s excellent. For those of you who are driving or don’t have any way of writing things down, don’t worry about it, we’ve got you. We will have all of his contact information in our show notes, so you will be able to reach out to him. Thank you again for joining me. This has been an amazing conversation. David Jernigan 1:05:30Thank you, I appreciate you having me on. It was a lot of fun. The post Episode 252 – Induced Native Phage Therapy (INPT) & advanced natural therapies first appeared on Let's Talk Wellness Now.

Katya Krykunova from the University of Ottawa interviews Dr. Marisa Azad from The Ottawa Hospital about the first use of phage therapy in Canada. Dr. Azad's patient developed a life-threatening periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) of her hip implant. She was allergic to most major antibiotics; the culprit bacteria were resistant to all others, and further surgery would risk her life. All conventional treatments were exhausted. With the patient's condition declining, Dr. Azad decided to team up with Cytophage Technologies and pursue phage therapy as a last resort. In this episode, Dr. Azad walks us through this clinical case and highlights how phage therapy offers an alternative approach for targeting infections when antibiotics and surgery fail. Learn more: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/17/8/11180:04 | BEaTS and host introduction0:20 | What is phage therapy?0:56 | Introduction to Dr. Marisa Azad2:52 | What are PJIs?4:26 | Using phage therapy for a severe case of PJI7:29 | Making phage therapy possible for this patient in collaboration with Cytophage Technologies9:27 | Ensuring the safety and efficacy of phage therapy11:31 | What Dr. Azad has learned throughout the process13:07 | Science, medicine, and art14:08 | Concluding remarksSoundtrack by The Underground Drive. All rights reserved. Listen more:https://music.apple.com/ca/artist/the-underground-drive/1571062779https://open.spotify.com/artist/4sCJG8TMQyTZ9FDd1JjJmRShow Host: Katya KrykunovaProducer: Meghan WalshWriter: Sydney Brown, Katya KrykunovaContent generation: Talia LoFaro, Meghan Walsh, Katya KrykunovaEditor: Meghan Walsh, Katya Krykunova, Sydney Brown, Talia LoFaroAudio post-production: Sydney BrownSocial media coordinator: Talia LoFaro

What if the answer to battling antibiotic-resistant infections isn't a new antibiotic, but harnessing viruses that have been quietly dominating bacterial populations?Bacteriophages, viruses that target and kill bacteria, have been saving lives for a century, but their true potential is only now being unlocked by modern machine learning. The race isn't just about discovering effective phages; it's about deploying the right therapy, personalized to the patient, before time runs out.On this episode, David Brühlmann welcomes José Luis Bila, Co-Founder and CEO of Precise Health. Driven by personal tragedy and an engineer's mindset, José is shaping a future where AI-powered phage therapy isn't a niche solution, but a scalable, accessible weapon against the superbugs that evade antibiotics. From building bioreactor capacity to navigating regulatory gray zones, José brings a rare blend of technical vision and practical urgency to a problem that affects families and health systems worldwide.Key topics discussed:The challenge of evolving bacteria and phages, and the question of whether it's possible to keep up with nature's pace through engineering new phages in silico (00:00)Overview of bacteriophage production: complexity, types of bioreactors used, and comparison with chemical synthesis (02:54)Bioproduction logistics: using CDMOs vs. in-house hospital production and the real-world timescales for manufacturing (02:32)Barriers for smaller or less funded hospitals, especially in low- and middle-income countries, with thoughts on hospital infrastructure differences worldwide (04:41)Creative solutions for cost-effective phage production in remote and underserved regions, such as the potential for single-use or mobile bioreactors (06:01)Why downstream processing and ensuring product purity is a bottleneck; the need for miniaturization and economic scalability (06:40)Parallels and differences in downstream processing between bacteriophages and viral vectors (09:15)The vital role of stability and shelf life for phage therapy logistics and economic viability (09:15)Regulatory pathways for phage therapy in Europe and beyond, including magistral preparations, ethical approvals, and adapting to digital tools for selection (12:39)The future vision: routine clinic entry through matching existing phage libraries, with longer-term goals of engineering bespoke phages via AI when necessary (15:52)José's perspective on building global infrastructure and making phage therapy cost-effective and universally accessible (18:08)José Bila's message: solutions to antimicrobial resistance are within reach. The biotech community must build accessible infrastructure, using AI and innovative systems to ensure phage therapy benefits reach every patient, everywhere.Connect with José Luis Bila:LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/josé-luis-bila-phd-3b08a5a7Precise Health SA: www.precisehealth.ioInterested in how scientists are fighting superbugs? Learn how phage therapy and smart bioprocess design are helping outmaneuver drug-resistant pathogens. Check out this interview with one of our previous guests!Episodes 187-188: From Biology Is Messy to Designable: The Smart Bioprocessing Transformation with Carmen Jungo RhêmeNext step:Book a 20-minute call to help yo

Antibiotic resistance isn't just a looming problem. It's a global crisis. Every year, more than one million people die directly from resistant infections, and another 5 million die indirectly. Routine infections are becoming life-threatening, and healthcare systems worldwide are under pressure.Despite decades of warnings, pharmaceutical solutions are falling behind, while “superbugs” continue to outpace new drug development. If trends continue, by 2050, antibiotic resistance could claim 10 million lives annually and cost the world $1 trillion.Meet José Luis Bila, a chemist-turned-biotech-founder, who transformed personal tragedy into a mission to disrupt this deadly status quo. After losing both parents to antibiotic-resistant infections, José dedicated his career to the search for targeted, effective alternatives. Now, as Co-Founder and CEO of Precise Health SA, he's building AI-powered bacteriophage therapy platforms that promise to revolutionize personalized infection treatments and outmaneuver today's most stubborn bacteria.Why tune into this episode? Here are three standouts from José's story and his technical playbook:José's personal story: Losing both parents to antibiotic resistance and its impact on his career path. (00:00)Scope of the antibiotic resistance crisis: Global deaths, indirect impacts, and economic cost projections. (06:29)Why big pharma is pulling out of antibiotic development and why innovation may come from smaller startups. (07:29)Why antibiotic resistance persists: Static nature of antibiotics versus adaptable bacteria, and misuse of antibiotics. (09:45)Introduction to bacteriophage therapy and its specificity challenges. (11:46)The current slow, manual process for matching phages to infections and its limitations in urgent clinical settings. (13:08)How machine learning is being used at Precise Health to rapidly identify and source the right phages using genetic information. (16:58)The potential to reduce phage matching and delivery time from months to just days, and how smart batching and regional surveillance improve economics. (17:23)José Luis Bila's journey shows the power of science driven by purpose. Through persistence, he's pioneering AI-driven phage therapy - offering precision, hope, and a potential lifeline in the fight against antibiotic-resistant infections.Connect with José Luis Bila:LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/josé-luis-bila-phd-3b08a5a7Precise Health SA: www.precisehealth.ioInterested in how scientists are fighting superbugs? Learn how phage therapy and smart bioprocess design are helping outmaneuver drug-resistant pathogens. Check out this interview with one of our previous guests!Episodes 187-188: From Biology Is Messy to Designable: The Smart Bioprocessing Transformation with Carmen Jungo RhêmeNext step:Book a 20-minute call to help you get started on any questions you may have about bioprocessing analytics: https://bruehlmann-consulting.com/call

Matters Microbial #100: What's the Buzz on Phage Therapy for Honeybees? July 14, 2025 Today, Dr. Heather Hendrickson from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand joins the #QualityQuorum to discuss the research she and her team are conducting on bacteriophage therapy to protect vulnerable honeybees from bacterial infections. Host: Mark O. Martin Guest: Heather Hendrickson Subscribe: Apple Podcasts, Spotify Become a patron of Matters Microbial! Links for this episode Here is the website for a former undergraduate research student of mine, Dr. Paula Welander, now a professor and administrator at Stanford University.  Yes, I am proud. Here is a link to another former undergraduate research student of mine, Dr. Krista Venecia Edmiston, now a professor at California Health Sciences University.  Yes, I am proud. A review on cell shape in bacteria. A review on the cytoskeleton of bacteria and archaea. I am a great admirer of Dr. John Roth, and his clearheaded and direct approach to microbial genetics.  Here is his academic website with many publications. An article about the causative agent of American Foulbrood, Paenibacillus larvae. An overview of American Foulbrood's impact on honeybees. The honeybee lifecycle. Beemites and honeybees. A video overview of bacteriophage therapy against bacterial diseases. An explainer of bacteriophage plaques. A video overview of lytic versus lysogenic bacteriophages. Dr. Graham Hatfull and his simply amazing SEAPHAGEs program, teaching so many people about isolating and studying bacteriophages. An article from Dr. Hendrickson's laboratory exploring cell shape in bacteria. An article from Dr. Hendrickson's laboratory explaining the importance of protecting honeybees from American Foulbrood, and the approach her laboratory uses. An article from Dr. Hendrickson's laboratory describing a community based approach to search for bacteriophages of Paenibacillus larvae. An article from Dr. Hendrickson's laboratory analyzing the types of Paenibacillus attacking bacteriophages isolated in New Zealand. An article from Dr. Hendrickson's laboratory describing an improved method for isolating bacteriophages. A truly great video from Dr. Hendrickson some years ago, explaining her research.  This is a “must see.” Dr. Hendrickson's faculty webpage. Dr. Hendrickson's informative research group website. This section of Dr. Hendrickson's research group website is devoted to outreach, and so very worth your time. Intro music is by Reber Clark Send your questions and comments to mattersmicrobial@gmail.com

Phage therapy has been hailed as the next line of defence against the rise of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Dr Leah Smith has been researching the treatment. 

Antimicrobial resistance is a rising global threat. When these become ineffective, infections can become difficult or impossible to treat, leading to an increase in the spread and severity of disease. In a new study, published in Nature Medicine, a team of researchers at the Center for Phage Biology and Therapy at Yale discovered a novel approach that may revolutionize the fight against antimicrobial resistance. In the study, the research team investigated the use of phage therapy—the use of viruses, or phages, to target and kill bacteria—to help patients with cystic fibrosis, a disease in which antimicrobial resistance is a significant issue. The team pioneered a strategy to select phages that not only kill bacteria that cause infections but also weaken surviving bacteria to become less virulent or less resistant to antibiotics. Joining me today to discuss phage therapy and their research is Jon Koff, MD, Dr. Koff is an associate professor in Yale School of Medicine's Section of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine and medical director of the Center for Phage Biology and Therapy.   Check out the paper: Phage Therapy May Treat Drug Resistance in Patients With Cystic Fibrosis, Study Finds   Watch the video version at Outbreak News TV

Phage therapy is stepping into the spotlight as antibiotic resistance rises - and Jessica Sacher is helping lead the charge. In this episode, Ross Katz speaks with Jessica, Co-Founder of Phage Directory and Staff Scientist at Stanford, about sourcing phages, operationalizing therapy, and predicting efficacy through data. This conversation explores how personalized phage therapy works, its scalability, and the data challenges shaping its future. ​​What You'll Learn in This Episode: Why phage therapy is a promising solution to antibiotic-resistant infectionsHow Phage Directory connects researchers and clinicians to accelerate treatmentWhat operational hurdles exist in scaling personalized phage productionHow data science is being applied to predict effective phage-bacteria matchesWhy building infrastructure and awareness is essential to adoption in clinical care Connect with Our Guest: Sponsor: CorrDyn, a data consultancyFind out more about Phage DirectoryConnect with Jessica on LinkedIn Connect with Us: Follow the podcast for more insightful discussions on the latest in biotech and data science.Subscribe and leave a review if you enjoyed this episode! Resources Mentioned:  Why Language Itself Might Be Holding Back AI – by Ross Katz: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-language-itself-might-holding-back-ai-ross-katz-rcl9e/?trackingId=Y6%2FH45W%2BxImfl%2By2geB6%2Bg%3D%3DBacteriophage Therapy for Multidrug-Resistant Infections – PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40026251/Cystic Fibrosis Australia and Phage Australia Survey – medRxiv: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.14.24307275v1Phage Directory: https://phage.directory/

 Finally, there is a remedy, even invented 100 years ago…Called Phages bacterial treatmentWhat is Phage Therapy?Phages, formally known as bacteriophages, are viruses that solely kill and selectively target bacteria. They are the most common biological entities in nature and have been shown to effectively fight and destroy multi-drug resistant bacteria. Namely, when all antibiotics fail, phages still succeed in killing the bacteria and may save a life from an infection.The phage virus needs a host where it can spread its eggs. The host is that specific bacteria that you want to kill. The phage virus injects its eggs inside that bacteria. The eggs grow to that phage virus and kill the bacteria… Thousands of new phage viruses search for the correct bacteria …  Imagine that… After a short time, all the bacteria are killed. The problem is to find the correct phage virus to kill that specific bacteria or even the Superbug. And that can be done because you find the phage virus everywhere… At least in garbage places or water filtering systems.  The main concern for all of us now is the alarming rate of increasing 'superbugs' that are resistant to most — if not all — antibiotics, as well as the impact they will have on human health and the longevity of life. These issues, combined with a lack of regulation to approve the process of phage therapy for anything less than an absolute, no-alternative emergency, pose a serious concern for us. We hope that through our work here at PATH, we can make this treatment more widely available to save lives where no other treatments could.My Video: How to kill dangerous bacteria like the Superbugs? https://youtu.be/H_BSLJ8bzfQMy Audio: https://divinesuccess.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/Podcast4/How-to-kill-dangerous-bacteria-like-the-Superbugs.mp3

Send us a textDr. Jessica Sacher, Ph.D. is Co-Founder of Phage Directory ( https://phage.directory/ ), a global network of phage researchers from more than 80 countries, where she directs its phage-sourcing and community-building efforts, including coordinating over 50 phage-finding efforts, where a network of more than 1,300 members of the global phage community volunteer their time and lab space to identify active phages for patients.Dr. Sacher is also a Staff Scientist at Stanford University School of Medicine ( https://profiles.stanford.edu/jessica-sacher ) in Dr. Paul Bollyky's lab where she leads strategy & lays groundwork for a new phage-based therapeutic development and delivery center at Stanford, developing manufacturing processes and quality control pipelines for clinical-grade phage biologics, as well as evaluating phages as gene and peptide delivery vectors for eukaryotic and microbial cells.Dr. Sacher was previously a member of Prof. Jon Iredell's group in Sydney, Australia as a postdoctoral research scientist for the Phage Australia project where she developed and streamlined Phage Australia's phage selection, biobanking, and manufacturing process, to make phage therapy available for patients Australia-wide and eventually beyond.Dr. Sacher received her PhD in Microbiology and Biotechnology in 2018 from the University of Alberta, Canada.Dr. Sacher is also Founder, Editor, Writer of Capsid & Tail: the phage community newsletter, a weekly report on bacteriophage news and researchImportant Episode Links -  Bacteriophage therapy for multidrug-resistant infections: current technologies and therapeutic approaches - Published March 3, 2025  - The Journal of Clinical Investigation -https://www.jci.org/articles/view/187996The Citizen Phage Library (https://citizenphage.com) #JessicaSacher #PhageDirectory #Bacteriophage #StanfordUniversity #Campylobacter #SteffanieStrathdee #Microbiology #PhageBiobank #Biofilms #AMR #AntimicrobialResistance #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities #IraPastor #Podcast #Podcaster #ViralPodcast #STEM #Innovation #Technology #Science #ResearchSupport the show

The infections disease landscape is constantly changing - challenging our standard treatments. Can new - as well as ancient - therapies be the answer? Hear from experts on the cutting edge of phage therapy, HIV/AIDS research and cancer care about what is on the horizon to improve human health. Series: "Stem Cell Channel" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 39982]

The infections disease landscape is constantly changing - challenging our standard treatments. Can new - as well as ancient - therapies be the answer? Hear from experts on the cutting edge of phage therapy, HIV/AIDS research and cancer care about what is on the horizon to improve human health. Series: "Stem Cell Channel" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 39982]

The infections disease landscape is constantly changing - challenging our standard treatments. Can new - as well as ancient - therapies be the answer? Hear from experts on the cutting edge of phage therapy, HIV/AIDS research and cancer care about what is on the horizon to improve human health. Series: "Stem Cell Channel" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 39982]

The infections disease landscape is constantly changing - challenging our standard treatments. Can new - as well as ancient - therapies be the answer? Hear from experts on the cutting edge of phage therapy, HIV/AIDS research and cancer care about what is on the horizon to improve human health. Series: "Stem Cell Channel" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 39982]

The infections disease landscape is constantly changing - challenging our standard treatments. Can new - as well as ancient - therapies be the answer? Hear from experts on the cutting edge of phage therapy, HIV/AIDS research and cancer care about what is on the horizon to improve human health. Series: "Stem Cell Channel" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 39982]

The infections disease landscape is constantly changing - challenging our standard treatments. Can new - as well as ancient - therapies be the answer? Hear from experts on the cutting edge of phage therapy, HIV/AIDS research and cancer care about what is on the horizon to improve human health. Series: "Stem Cell Channel" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 39982]

The infections disease landscape is constantly changing - challenging our standard treatments. Can new - as well as ancient - therapies be the answer? Hear from experts on the cutting edge of phage therapy, HIV/AIDS research and cancer care about what is on the horizon to improve human health. Series: "Stem Cell Channel" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 39982]

Diane Shader Smith's daughter Mallory died from complications of cystic fibrosis 6 years ago. She was 25 years old. Diane initially published her daughter's diary, "Salt in My Soul".  This book gave insight into how Mallory was feeling during her CF fight. Her deepest thoughts, and life lessons.Diane Shader Smith  is now releasing a second book on behalf of her daughter, "Diary of a dying Girl".  The title honestly may sound depressing, but as Diane explains, it is a wakeup call about our public health crisis and is an empowering story. Mallory's writing is so beautiful. And I can tell you, you won't be sad reading her book, you'll be inspired. In this podcast Diane explains that it's our job to raise awareness about Phage Therapy, and about the dangers of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Something that everyone should become educated about, whether CF is your disease space, or not.You can buy Mallory's book here:  https://diaryofadyinggirl.com    All the money goes to AMR research through Mallory's Legacy Fund. You can also sign up, and tell your story at the Global AMR Diary: https://www.globalamrdiary.org Please like, subscribe, and comment on our shows, wherever you get your podcasts.Please consider making a donation: https://thebonnellfoundation.org/donate/The Bonnell Foundation website:https://thebonnellfoundation.orgEmail us at: thebonnellfoundation@gmail.com Thanks to our sponsors:Vertex: https://www.vrtx.comViatris: https://www.viatris.com/en

Happy Tuesday Everyone and Welcome back to the latest episode of Phage Therapy Today! Phage science is awesome, the business is growing, and the numbers on paper are looking great. But along with this excitement, we must realize the end goal is to save lives and improve clinical outcomes. The truth is phage therapy is still very far from accessible to the general public today. There are many reasons for this, and the lack of information and community available to the general public and doctors is definitely a major contributing factor. Because phage therapy is not yet the standard of care and is considered experimental, doubt from doctors and patients can delay the start of phage therapy treatment. In this week's episode, Christopher Schaffer shares his story of how he saved his own life by going on a journey where he took the lead in finding a cure for his MDR infection. He did tons of research on his own, reaching out to all the help  he could get, and navigating through difficult situations related to Covid and the Ukraine war. The amount of courage, determination, and faith he demonstrated is awe-inspiring. Let's give it a listen! To bridge this gap, I am unofficially announcing the formation of a nonprofit organization led by Christopher Schaffer, Professor Irene Chen, and myself. Our aim is to create a community for patients and doctors looking into phage therapy. The goal is to provide information on success stories from past patients to build trust in phage therapy, connect with therapeutic resources, and provide support to all going through AMR infections, ensuring you are not alone out there. As a first step, I would like people to re-post, @doctors, and patients who require phage therapy resources to join our Discord group at: https://discord.gg/gtrX5ZpE. We would also like everyone else passionate about phage therapy to join and comment in the “volunteers” and “general” channels only.

In this Part 2 of the Alloutcoach podcast episode focused on phage therapy to fight infections and antimicrobial resistance, I spoke to the Chief Physician at the globally leading center of excellence of an alternative, effective treatment approach to antibiotics, Dr. Dea Nizharadze at the Eliava Phage Therapy Center (EPTC) based in Tbilisi, Georgia. She explains the basic principles of phage treatments, its unique qualities, advantages and real-world clinical examples of methods and types of patients and infections this personalized therapy specifically targets. 0:00 Episode Introduction 1:42 Why the Republic of Georgia is a global leader in phage therapy 2:39 How phage therapy works in bacterial infections?Eliava Phage Therapy Center (EPTC) was founded in 1923 by Professor George Eliava who had collaborated with Felix D'Herelle, who had discovered phages, and while most other countries turned to antibiotics only, it is the only institution in the world that has continued to research bacteriophages without a pause of even one day since its inception and therefore collected the greatest research and real-world clinical experience with phages. 5:34 How do phages work to eradicate or stop further growth of bacteria? Phages are biological "weapons" against bacteria, namely viruses that target specific microbes only, without destroying the "good" bacteria or microbiota. They are naturally occurring substances and have no safety concerns. In some patients with antimicrobial resistance phage therapy enables improvement in sensitivity. 10:42 Synergistic effect of phage combination therapy with antibiotics 11:58 Phage Therapy Doisng and Success Factors 15:14 Length of phage treatmentIn chronic infections phage therapy may divided into 3 stages and last 15-20 days, and varies by nature and severity of disease. Patient treatment includes days off therapy, or holidays, however, bacterial analysis is continued and patient condition is monitored throughout the entire course of treatment. Success of therapy is indicated when bacterial titers and virulence decrease or bacteria are eradicated. Patient's objective and subjective signs and symptoms often vary throughout response to therapy. 16:42 Phage Product Variability and Market Availability How do we ensure educating patients to access the correct, most appropriate therapy for their infections 17:35 Multi-disciplinary personalized team care and telemedicine 19:53 Steps for patients outside of Georgia to access phage therapy via telemedicine? 24:04 Affordability and access to phage treatments 25:23 How to contact Eliava Phage Therapy Center

In this episode, hosts Josh Davis (Newcastle, Australia) and Angela Huttner (Geneva, Switzerland) interview the phage ‘microbiologist-clinician duo', Drs. Shawna McCallin and Lorenz Leitner (Balgrist Hospital, Zurich, Switzerland). They explore the history of phages, the process of bringing phage therapy to a patient, potential resistance to phages, availability of individualized therapy versus phage cocktails, and the place of phage therapy in the future. Drs. Leitner and McCallin reflect on the challenges and lessons of their recently published randomized trial comparing phage therapy to antibiotics for urinary tract infection. Episode peer-reviewed by Dr. Olivia Funk of Long Island University. LiteratureLeitner L, Ujmajuridze A, Chanishvili N et al.  Intravesical bacteriophages for treating urinary tract infections in patients undergoing transurethral resection of the prostate: a randomised, placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trial. Lancet Infect Dis. 2021 Mar;21(3):427-436. doi: 10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30330-3. 

House Doctor Raj Bhardwaj says a woman in Ottawa recently became the first person in Canada to benefit from what's called “Phage Therapy”

House doctor Mike Simon speaks with host Julia Wright about phage therapy and why are researchers hopeful that the experimental treatment could help to make antibiotics more effective. 

Phage therapy has gained a lot of traction but the challenges created by this approach have not been properly assessed at a big scale. We often read about therapy successes on isolated cases but, rarely, we read or hear about failures. AAC recently published a case series of patients who failed phage therapy. Today, we will discuss this topic with the principal investigator on the research. Topics discussed: Phage therapy as an approach for MDR bacteria. The challenges of phage therapies. Issues that can influence the success of phage therapy Guest: Saima Aslam, MBBS. Director, Solid Organ Transplant Infectious Diseases Service, Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Diego. Article: Pseudomonas aeruginosa ventricular assist device infections: findings from ineffective phage therapies in five cases https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aac.01728-23 Questions Answered: How are we doing with phage therapy at this point? What are the challenges to deploy phage therapy in clinical settings? The 5 cases of failure of phage therapy in patients with LVADs summarized What factors did Dr. Aslam identify that were related with the failure? How do you develop neutralization against phages and how can you prevent it?   Bacterial isolates with varying phage susceptibility, how can this be detected? What did Dr. Aslam learn? Future research This episode is brought to you by the Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy journal available at aac.asm.org. If you plan to publish in AAC, ASM Members get up to 50% off publishing fees. Visit asm.org/membership to sign up. Visit journals.asm.org/journal/aac to browse issues and/or submit a manuscript.

An experimental treatment is providing some hope for people dealing with antibiotic resistant infections. The first person in Canada to receive phage therapy says it saved her life. It's not available yet outside clinical trials. Dr. Peter Lin explains.

​An Ottawa-area woman has become the first person in Canada to receive an experimental treatment for a chronic joint infection. ​J​eanne Armstrong spoke to Dr. Peter Lin ​about phage-therapy and why doctors are hopeful about the potential of this experimental therapy in treating antibiotic resistant infections.

Dr. Diaz Vera, Infectious Diseases Fellow at the University of South Florida Division of Infectious Diseases, presents a companion lecture to his original talk on bacteriophage therapy. Because of the rising tide of antimicrobial resistance, many experts believe that we are entering the post-antibiotic era in medicine. As a result, researchers are exploring phage-antimicrobial synergy in an attempt to make our antibiotic armamentarium go farther. Dr. Diaz elaborates on the application of phage-antimicrobial synergy and provides examples of phage therapy utilized in the clinical setting. For Dr. Diaz’s original talk, please click here: Intro to Bacteriophage therapy

As many reflect on the past few years of the pandemic and continue thinking about emerging threats of the future, it's important to bring awareness to that very topic, the future, and what's on the horizon in public health. Today's episode is Part 3 of a series that focuses on the emerging threat of antimicrobial resistance, which has been deemed by The World Health Organization as one of the top 10 global public health threats facing humanity. The episode digs deeper into innovations happening globally to help defeat superbugs and evolve the applications of Phage Therapy as well as deepening connectivity to the broader healthcare community. This episode's guest is Jessica Sacher, PhD, a Canadian Phage Microbiologist and Co-Founder of Phage Directory as well as Phage Australia. The Phage Directory goal is founded in helping doctors find phage scientists willing to share their phages to rescue patients dying from antibiotic-resistant infections. Phage Directory is now the global phage community's central source of news & connectivity that supports thousands of phage professionals, from 80+ countries, helping clinicians source phages for their patients while also helping organizations manage, grow, and learn from their phage collections. Listen in with us as we continue to explore this evolving science and how it's innovations will continue to create alternative paths to treat a variety of health conditions as told from scientists that are influential in the space. Other topics range from the significance of climate change as a contributor to emerging human viruses, to how gene editing technologies are helping to evolve precision medicine and designer therapies, to the future of phage applications across a range of practical applications. For more details visit TechLink Health on the web or connect with Jessica and Phage Directory @ Phage.Directory or

Discover 'The Good Virus,' and 'The Master Builder,' books that highlight the forgotten promise of phage therapy and delve into the new science of the cell. This podcast unravels stories of quirky scientists and transformative discoveries that are bringing attention back to old discoveries with the potential to combat stubborn ailments and reveal fascinating new truths about biology. Tune in as we explore the origins, the intriguing history, and the potential future of phage therapy, and discuss the ways it could help in fighting antibiotic resistance.

TWiM explains personalized aerosilized phage therapy for a chronic lung infection, and using the combination of antibiotic and a DNA molecule that binds alpha-gal to reduce S. aureus infection in vivo. Hosts: Vincent Racaniello and Michael Schmidt Subscribe to TWiM (free) on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Android, RSS, or by email. Become a Patron of TWiM! Links for this episode: Aerosolized phage therapy (Nat Comm) Alpha-gal aptamer and vancomycin for MRSA (Microorg) Alpha-gal syndrome (Front Allergy) Natural antibody protects against viral infection (virology blog) Music used on TWiM is by Ronald Jenkees. Send your microbiology questions and comments to twim@microbe.tv

 Sugar replacements, known generally as artificial sweeteners or non-nutritive sweeteners, have been in the news a lot. Rising concerns exist about safety and the effects of the sweeteners on many key features of health, including the microbiome. We need the help of talented scientists to sort through this complex web of information. Today's guest, Professor Eran Elinav, has done some of the seminal research in this area. He's an expert on systems immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Interview Summary So back in 2014, you and your colleagues published a study in the prestigious journal Nature showing that sweeteners could induce glucose intolerance - a highly concerning finding, What's more, they did so by changing the microbiome. Would you tell us a little bit more about this study and what subsequent researchers found. In the study that published in Nature back in 2014, we explored the consumption of several kinds of artificial sweeteners when administered to mice. We wanted to ask a very simple but important question - are dose formulations of hypersweet compounds, which are so massively consumed by humans, in fact being responded to by our gut microbes. We know from our other studies that gut microbes contain a very well-developed machinery that enables them to respond and to digest multiple very complex formulations of food. We asked ourselves whether these seemingly inherent compounds could induce changes in the gut microbiome that could impact the health of these mice. And indeed, when we tested this, we mainly focused on saccharin, but in several experiments saw that could also be true for other common artificial sweeteners. We saw that the gut microbiome of mice being given saccharin in different concentrations, (using different strains of mice and different obesity conditions) were indeed capable of reacting to saccharin, changing their microbiome composition and behavior accordingly, and in some cases, resulting in a very surprising, counterintuitive worsening of glucose control towards diabetes. That was very concerning to us, because many millions of people worldwide consume artificial sweeteners with an aim of satisfying their sweet tooth without having to pay the caloric price. Especially people who are prone or already suffer prediabetes or even type II diabetes. What we could show was that the gut microbiome in some configurations could actually drive a disturbed control of sugar levels in the blood of these mice, which could suggest that in some cases, the gut microbiome could actually be bad for you when you consume artificial sweeteners in terms of your sugar management. That is a landmark study by any standard, so congratulations for doing such important science. That was back in 2014. So what has research shown since then?  We were able to prove in that study that consumption of artificial sweeteners was not only associated with changes in the microbiome and with the trend towards altered sugar control, but it was actually costly. We did this by transferring microbiomes from mice that were exposed to saccharin or to other artificial sweeteners into mice that do not have any microbiome of their own. They're called germ-free mice. We could see that these recipient mice who never consumed artificial sweeteners were developing the same exact disturbances in their sugar control just by the exposure to microbes that were previously exposed to artificial sweeteners. Now, this was very surprising, very important, and also caused a lot of backfire from the industry as one would expect. But it led to an array of follow up studies by multiple groups, mainly in other mice models and utilizing other formulations of artificial sweeteners, which basically suggested that our observations were correct. Artificial sweeteners were not inert when given to mice in different contexts and disease states. Now, the biggest limitation of our original study and all these many follow up studies was that all of these experiments were conducted in mice. The billion-dollar question was, can we recapitulate these findings at least, to some extent, in the human setting? This prompted us to perform a very ambitious human clinical trial which took multiple years to complete. It was finally published a year ago. The take home from that study which focused on all four commonly consumed artificial sweeteners was the concept that we've highlighted almost a decade ago - it was correct when applied to humans. Those findings raise alarms on many different levels. I appreciate you sharing that information with us. Recently, the World Health Organization has expressed concern about the sweeteners and their impact on people's ability to control body weight and health, and even risk for cancer. One of the counters from people who are in favor of these sweeteners is that the doses provided in these studies are many times what a human might ordinarily consume. What do you say to that? I will say two important things. First, this may have been true in previous studies a decade ago in which we all started by testing artificial sweeteners at relatively high doses. However, with years of follow-up studies and the expanded field of the doses of tested artificial sweeteners that were in many cases, reduced to those below the recommended daily allowance in humans. And, in the controlled clinical trials published a year ago, doses of four artificial sweeteners that we supplemented our participants were well below the recommended daily allowance. And still in some people, we could see that these seemingly inherent compounds were able to reproducibly change the microbiome and to change to our configuration which could induce alterations in blood sugar control in these individuals. When those microbiomes were transferred to mice that had never seen artificial sweeteners, the microbiome integrations could also induce identical disturbances of blood sugar control in transfer mice. So, I think that our studies and plethora of other studies generate knowledge suggesting that artificial sweeteners may not be natural to the human body even when consumed in conservative doses. Well, thanks for that clarification. You mentioned some pushback from industry. Tell me what form that took. Was there a particular player in industry that was doing the pushback? Did you think that their concerns were valid? Well, I think that it is a natural part of the evolution of a set of discoveries that have a direct impact on human health and human nutrition. And also, of course, economic considerations. Some of the claims were less than fair, and others were more relevant. One needs to understand, and I'm saying this both as a physician and as a scientist, especially given our early studies, that you can make the best effort that you can and comprehensively try to tackle a question. But there are always things people can claim that were not done or should be done better. Science is not a one-shot profession. We come up with a discovery and then we build upon it, and others also come in, validate it, build upon it, and this was the process. So, I take everything with love. Many other people have experienced a healthy discussion with the industry, and I think we've all matured into understanding, at least in our group, we are not against artificial sweeteners or any other food compound. We are just keen and interested in learning how different food compounds including artificial sweeteners, impact our body in unforeseen ways, and we focus on the gut microbiome. This huge and poorly explored ecosystem, which we now understand is an integral part of our body, has amazing biochemical capacities to degrade and respond to almost any substance. With artificial sweeteners, I think that this revelation is actually very helpful to the industry because with this knowledge, and knowledge that is added by others, we are hopeful that by understanding that artificial sweeteners are not inert to the human bodies, we would be able, together with the industry or with whoever is interested in helping this effort, understand which formulations are safer than others. Which doses are safer than others; and which are the human populations at risk, who should think twice before they consume these compounds. While others could consume them and enjoy them with relatively little risk. I think this maturation of our knowledge and maturation of the field is, in general, a very positive one. So, with respect to the impact of these sweeteners on the microbiome, is there reason to have special concern about children? When we conduct human clinical trials, we're always hypersensitive about special populations at risk such as children, people who are incarcerated, and so on and so forth. We usually tend at least in groundbreaking first human trials, such as the one that we've conducted with artificial sweeteners, we try to avoid these at-risk populations just so our initial observations are based on populations that are not at special risks. So, children, as you know, are always a special population that we're even more concerned about than a general population. Our own setting was not inclusive of children, though our inclusion criteria included healthy adults 18 years of age and older. So, with respect to children, I can say that our own data did not explore them to date. But in general, we are always especially concerned about children. Any potential metabolic perturbation during that critical growth window for children is of special medical concern to us. Let me ask you one final, big-picture question. The defenders of these products are basically implying, if not sort of stating directly, that the pursuit of sweetness is a reasonable thing to have and that these products can deliver the sweetness that people enjoy, but potentially without negative effects. That's the position. But what about that basic proposition that the pursuit of sweetness is a reasonable thing to do, because couldn't one say that this pursuit, whether it's delivered or whether the remedy to wanting to have more sweetness comes from either sugar or artificial sweeteners, there is potential to be harmed. Wouldn't it make sense to just gradually reduce the level of sweetness in the food supply, so that people become accustomed to less sweet taste overall? I couldn't agree more with your statement. I have to say that our findings related to the non-inertness of artificial sweeteners and the potential adverse impacts on human metabolism do not imply in any form or shape that we recommend that people convert back from artificial sweetener into increased consumption of sugar. We know from endless medical literature that sugar is probably an ultimate evil when consumed in excess and is directly responsible for contribution to multiple human diseases including obesity, type II diabetes, fatty liver, and even other diseases including cancer. So going back to sugar would be a big mistake. But I totally agree with you that positioning the public opinion as one which must choose between two sweet solutions, either sugar or non-nutritive sweeteners as the only options, basically is biased because we as a post-industrial revolution human population, have dramatically increased our sugar consumption. I don't think that we need to choose between these two options. I personally opt to go back to water rather than choose between these two options which carry along probably adverse health consequences, at least in some human populations. Bio Eran Elinav is an Israeli immunologist and microbiota researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the German Cancer Research Centres. He is an international scholar at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a senior fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advance Research. Elinav studies the molecular basis of host-microbiota interactions, and their effects of diet, environmental factors, immune function and host genetics on the intestinal microbiome and associated multi-factorial metabolic, inflammatory malignant and neurogenerative disease. His most-cited papers have more than 2,000 cites each. Elinav developed precision microbiota interventions, including Personalized Nutrition, Precision Probiotics, small molecule ″postbiotics″, Phage Therapy, autologous fecal microbiome transplantation, Vaginal Microbiome Transplantation (VMT) and gut epithelial interventions.  

Human beings are biophotonic, plasmatic discharges and oscillating waves of energy. Some of the biggest physical ailments people suffer from can be solved by focusing on this truth, and treating the illness with what's already within.   This is where Native Phage Therapy comes in. By seeing the body as its own biocomputer, it's possible to pinpoint where the “software” is corrupted and the corrective measures that can be taken.   How does this treatment help people with infections like Lyme Disease? How do we deal with emotional frequencies trapped in the body?   In this episode, Dr. David Jernigan shares the work he's doing, and where we're headed as a species.   When you're sending a phage to fight a bacteria, it's not just going to die readily, they'll fight inside your body. -Dr. David Jernigan   Three Things We Learned    - Pull away from the convenience of pharmaceuticals Are people actually getting treated by traditional medicine or being fed a drug-induced illusion of health?   - The effect of 5G networks isn't conspiracy theory anymore What's the link between our technological quantum leaps and the massive biological dysfunction we're seeing?    - How to deal with illness Can a lot of health issues be linked to spiritual amputation and stuck energy?    Guest Bio   Dr. David Jernigan is the Founder and Owner of Biologix Center. Dr. Jernigan is one of the country's top innovators of precision bioenergetic testing and treatment technologies, with his most recent innovation, INPT (Induced Native Phage Therapy) possibly being one of his most important technologies to date. Dr. Jernigan is constantly pushing the limits of research and development with a passion to get ever closer to 100% cure rate. Dr. Jernigan was the first to publish a book on the natural treatment of people suffering from post-treatment Lyme Disease and is a published author of five books, with his best-seller being, “Beating Lyme Disease, 2nd Edition”  Dr. Jernigan is nationally recognized as a leader in the purest form of medical treatment philosophy, Biological and Bioregulatory Medicine. For 25 years Dr. Jernigan has only treated the toughest cases, with almost 90% of patients coming from other states and countries for his unique testing and treatments. He has trained doctors to utilize his powerful new technologies in his flagship clinic, the Biologix Center for Optimum Health, in Franklin, Tennessee, specializing in the treatment of chronic illness and previously considered incurable cases. He received his Bachelor's degree in Nutrition at Park University, graduating with honors, and his doctorate in Chiropractic Medicine at Cleveland University-Kansas City. He is a board-certified Doctor of Natural Medicine with an emphasis on chronic infections and chronic illness. Post-Graduate studies include natural and Anthroposophical medicine in Germany and Biological Medicine with the famed-father of European Biological Medicine, Dr. Thomas Rau, MD, of the Paracelsus Clinic of Switzerland. He is board-certified in Botanical Medicine through the University of Colorado, School of Pharmacy, and trains doctors in advanced homeopathy and bioenergetic medicine. Dr. Jernigan invented several advancements upon medical science, Biospectral Emission Sequence Testing, Matrix Interface Resonance Scanning, Fractal Frequency Modulation, NeuroPhotonic Therapy, Induced Native Phage Therapy, and NeuroCardial Synchronization. For more information, head to https://biologixcenter.com/ or call 855-955-1395.

Standardizing the phage therapy industry through processes like clinical trails is the way to go . One of the fundamental steps to broader use of phage therapy and successful therapy is producing phages following Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and JAFRAL is the leader in this field. In today's show we sit down with JAFRAL's founder and CEO Dr. Frenk Smrekar, a visionary who has been working on the development of GMP for bacteriophages throughout his whole career. Let's give a listen to his journey of founding the company and his observation and thought on the phage therapy field development through a GMP perspective. Learning more about JAFRAL @https://jafral.com A review paper on GMP in Phage Therapy by https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2020.01161

Presenter Dr Shane is joined by Drs Jen and Euan. In this week's show the first guest, Kita Williams from QUT, talks about the environment and studying on Macquarie Island, then Graci continues her Science of Tattooing series and finally the second guest, Dr. Stephanie Lynch from Westmead Institute for Medical Research, talks about phage therapy. Then in the news Canadian fires, The Anthropause and Taurine.Remember, “Science is everywhere”, including:Program page: Einstein-A-Go-GoFacebook page: Einstein-A-Go-GoTwitter: Einstein-A-Go-Goand live every Sunday at 11:00a.m AEST on RRR 102.7mHz FM.

SpaceX Explosion Damages Environment Around Launch Site Last Thursday, SpaceX's South Texas facility was awash in noise and fire, as crowds gathered in South Padre Island and Port Isabel to watch Starship's first orbital launch. It was the largest and most powerful rocket ever made, standing at around 400 feet tall. Four minutes into the launch, SpaceX detonated the rocket after the SuperHeavy booster failed to separate from the Starship as planned. The launch destroyed the company's launch pad, spreading concrete up to three quarters of a mile away. Cameras left by YouTubers were either knocked down or destroyed in the rumble, along with some of the fence surrounding the launch pad's road-facing property. To read the rest, visit sciencefriday.com.   The Private Space Race Takes A Toll On Planet Earth After the SpaceX explosion last month, debris wasn't the only thing on the minds of Science Friday listeners. The following messages arrived in our inbox after we reported on 3-D printed rockets in March. It was interesting to hear you discuss 7 space launches in 5 days, and then just moments later the fact that we're not on track to reduce carbon emissions. My understanding is that rocket launches release huge amounts of carbon and other greenhouse gases. Story idea?—@RevBobIerien, Twitter Also regarding the 3-D rockets there wasn't any concern made for space pollution was there? I may have tuned out unhappily before the end. —Juanita H, email How much carbon do rockets contribute to global warming? —Robert C, email Very disappointing to hear the report of new “cheaper” 3D-printed rockets are available so that, like fast food pods and big gulps, we can now drop even more cheap **** into the ocean. And, *immediately* following a story about the new report on climate change, what exactly is the carbon footprint resulting from the ability of more people to more cheaply fire rockets into space? —David M, email Carbon isn't the big pollutant that comes from spaceflight, says Dr. Eloise Marais, associate professor in physical geography at University College London. Instead, black carbon or soot particles are generated and released directly into the atmosphere, alongside reactive nitrogen and nitrogen oxides. Dr. Marais joins Ira to talk about how much of an impact increased rocket launches could have on the atmosphere, and how that compares to the auto industry.    How To Combat The Antibiotic Resistance Crisis For years scientists have been ringing alarm bells about a global antibiotic resistance crisis. Now hospitals and healthcare facilities face the consequences: In the United States, there are 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections every year, and more than 35,000 people die from these infections. Bacteria naturally try to outsmart the drugs designed to kill them, which causes treatments to become ineffective over time. While new antibiotics are made to respond to these resistant strains, the bacteria continue to evolve—creating a constant, and costly, cycle. There's a number of added factors driving the crisis, including antibiotic use in livestock and the general overprescription of antibiotics. About 1 in 3 antibiotic prescriptions in outpatient settings like urgent care or emergency departments are unnecessary. Scientists are struggling to keep up with the need to replace antibiotics that no longer work. It's a never ending game of catch up. Ira discusses some of the possible solutions to this vexing problem and takes listener questions with Dr. Victor Nizet, faculty lead of the Collaborative to Halt Antibiotic-Resistant Microbes at the University of California San Diego and Dr. Eddie Stenehjem, executive vice chair of medicine at the University of Colorado.   Are Phages A New Page In Medicine? One of the many possible solutions to the global antibiotic resistance crisis is an old idea that's new again—bacteriophages, or phages for short. Phages are viruses that exist solely to kill bacteria and are abundant in nature. While scientists first discovered phages' ability to treat bacterial infections about a century ago, there's been little interest in turning them into a treatment for patients with antibiotic resistant infections—until recently. Ira talks with Dr. Graham Hatfull, professor of biotechnology at the University of Pittsburgh about the latest in phage science.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Conor and Dodi explore the new and exciting world of bacteriophage therapy. Join them as they speak to Anton Peleg, Professor of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology and the Director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at the Alfred Hospital and Monash University, about this new, emerging field. Together they discuss how phages, viruses that specifically target bacteria, are being used to fight against antibiotic-resistant superbugs, as well as the challenges of producing them at scale and getting them approved by regulatory bodies. Tune in to Discovery Matters to learn all this and more, and join the conversation about these important advances in life sciences. Show notes For more information on Professor Anton Peleg's work with phages: Old cure revived in fight against antibiotic-resistant superbugs (smh.com.au) RNA in space: Oba, Y., Koga, T., Takano, Y. et al. Uracil in the carbonaceous asteroid (162173) Ryugu. Nature Communications 14, 1292 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36904-3 Keywords: phage, bacteria, infection, antibiotics, rna, therapies, bacterial infections, penicillin, patients, antibiotic resistant bacteria, cholera, phage therapy, superbugs.

As the world continues to evolve toward advances in technology, the sciences, and globalization, it's important to reflect on the real-world gains of such progressions as well as the future opportunities that exist. In the case of this episode, the gains are associated with saving lives and combating the emerging threat of antimicrobial resistance and antibiotic resistant infections, which have been deemed by The World Health Organization as one of the top 10 global public health threats facing humanity. This episode is Part 2 of a series that focuses on AMR and the innovations in science and technology that are helping to tackle the challenge. The episode also points toward the connection between the issues of climate change and AMR as well as the opportunities to combine forces and develop collaborative efforts in addressing these threats. The episode digs deeper into innovations happening within healthcare to defeat superbugs as shared from the perspective of this episode's guest, Dr. Steffanie Strathdee, who is an Epidemiologist, Distinguished Professor, Global health solution-seeker, TEDx speaker, and Author of The Perfect Predator, a memoir of her effort to save her husband's life and the discovery of a forgotten cure that has the potential to save millions more. Steffanie also serves as Co-Director of the Center for Innovative Phage Applications & Therapeutics at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine as well as the Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences. Other topics range from the importance of advocacy and collaboration to tackle global health problems to how phages can help to evolve personalized medicine to how technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence can be used to advance Phage Therapy. Also, is there a need for more health solutions to connect the dots when traveling abroad? For more details visit TechLink Health @ https://www.techlink.health or connect with Dr. Strathdee @ The Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics. This episode was hosted by Rob McBride, Co-Founder and CEO of Felix Biotechnology and Dr. Sarah Samaan. The episode is packed with valuable insights and points to several references, including a direct email for those in need and interested in Phage Therapies as an alternative treatment:

In this week's Phage Therapy Today, we get back together with Dr. Gina Suh to learn about her recent progress and experience in the application of phage therapy at Mayo Clinic. If you are interested in learning about the first case of phage therapy in treatment of a cardiology case, leading to a successful heart transplant after the clearing of heavy bacterial burden, give it a listen to today's episode! Hear out about how things are progressing in the field and where are we going next from Gina's first hand experience.

We're revisiting this 2017 episode—with updates! The episode is an interview with Robert T. "Chip" Schooley, MD, a professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California, San Diego, and codirector of the school's Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics. Dr Schooley discusses the unique events that led to the first use of intravenous phage therapy in North America. Stay tuned to the end for an update on phage therapy and on Thomas Patterson, the patient who received the lifesaving treatment. Related Content: Phage Therapy's Role in Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Pathogens As Superbugs Flourish, Bacteriophage Therapy Recaptures Researchers' Interest

Healthcare professionals are searching for new ways to fight bacterial infections as growing concerns around antibiotic resistance reach new heights. Though bacteriophages or phages—viruses that infect only bacteria—have long since captured scientists' attention, they are quickly gaining popularity as a new and promising therapeutic tool. In this episode, Graham Hatfull, professor of biological sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, speaks with host Deborah Borfitz about his team's research and diligent work to showcase phages as versatile therapeutic agents. Hatfull also talks about the impressive findings produced by experimental phage therapy clinical trials and the barriers that currently prevent phages from ubiquitous antibacterial clinical use. He discusses his team's efforts to sequence phages and build a therapeutic library, the role of phage therapy in combating tuberculosis and cystic fibrosis, and the novel benefits phages bring to transplant recipients. Hatfull also addresses the FDA's support of phage therapy through expanded access for compassionate use and the global push to enter phages into their first-ever randomized controlled trial.  Links from this episode:  Clinical Research NewzUniversity of Pittsburgh Phage Therapy of Mycobacterium Infections: Compassionate Use of Phages in 20 Patients With Drug-Resistant Mycobacterial Disease SEA-PHAGES (Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science) FDA Expanded Access for Compassionate Use Phage Australia 

TWiM describes successful phage therapy against a mycobacterial lung infection, and how encapsulation of the cell wall protects S. pneumoniae from its major peptidoglycan hydrolase and host defenses. Links for this episode: Phage therapy against M. abscessus lung infection (Cell) Encapsulation of the septal cell wall protects S. pneumoniae from host defenses (PLoS Path) Letters read on TWiM 279

Former Detroit News reporter, Laura Varon Brown talks to The Bonnell Foundation about losing her Detroit News photojournalist husband, Jim, too cystic fibrosis.In this podcast Laura Varon Brown talks about his life, legacy and they daughter Molly they had together. The couple married in 1985, before the cystic fibrosis gene that causes cystic fibrosis was discovered by scientists in the genome project.  Jim sadly died from the disease just 5 years later, 13 weeks after their daughter Molly was born.Laura Veron Brown talks to Host Laura Bonnell about Jim's last work trip to the West Bank. Jim was there to take photographs of the armed prising of Palestinians against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Laura talks about being married to someone with CF, and about all the joys it brought to her life.Varon-Brown also talks about how she moved forward, remarried and had a second daughter, Emma.The two Laura's have been friends for 10 years and talk about the disease that brought them together. For more information on The Bonnell Foundation find us at:  https://thebonnellfoundation.org/Our new CF Familia page: https://thebonnellfoundation.org/familia/en-home/Thanks to our sponsors:Genentech: https://www.gene.com/Viatris:  https://www.viatris.com/enLaura Varon Brown:  https://www.gildasclubdetroit.orgThe original music in this podcast is performed by Kevin Allan, who happens to have Cystic Fibrosis.  You can find him on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/KevinAllanMusicThis podcast was produced by JAG in Detroit Podcasts: https://jagindetroit.com/

Dr. Steffanie Strathdee is Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences and Harold Simon Distinguished Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. She co-directs UCSD's new center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH), Global Health Institute and the International Core of UCSD's Center for AIDS Research. An infectious disease epidemiologist, she has spent the last two decades focusing on HIV prevention in marginalized populations and has published over 600 peer-reviewed publications. She has recently begun working to move bacteriophage therapy into clinical trials at IPATH. She has co-authored her memoir, The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug. In this podcast we talk about Dr. Strathdee's experiences learning about bacteriophage (phage) therapy treatment through a personal experience where her husband became extremely ill from antimicrobial resistant bacteria. She learned that stigma in part was how phage therapy had become forgotten in North America--stigma toward scientists with different beliefs and training than the mainstream, stigma toward viruses that maybe perceived "at the borderline of life", and stigma toward research based on geopolitics (including the "Russian taint"). Steffanie inspires listeners with her discussion of the power of global collaboration, advocacy in healthcare, and the importance of making (rather than waiting for) miracles to happen. Episode hosted by Dr. Carmen Logie. Supported by funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and Canada Research Chairs program. Original music and podcast produced by Jupiter Productions, who have various production services available to support your podcast needs.

Two teams are developing messages to send into space, in the hope that some advanced alien civilization will be able to pick them up. While METI is sending music, Beacon in the Galaxy is sending more complex information, like Earth's location - which as the team explains is rather controversial…Acne is usually treated using antibiotics, but as the issue of antibiotic resistance grows, researchers have been looking at alternative methods. The team discusses the promising early successes of phage therapy.Most of us overestimate just how diverse our environment is. A new study examining this ‘diversity illusion' has shown that we tend to believe minority groups are larger in number than they actually are. The team finds out how the research was carried out, and whether we can combat this bias.Known by some as the world's first computer, the Antikythera mechanism is an ancient Greek device that acts sort of like a clock. Now a group of researchers thinks they've found out the exact date and time it was calibrated to, and the team explains how they worked it out.Rhesus macaque monkeys may be as aware of their own heartbeats as human babies. The team examines a new study which looked at a kind of self awareness called interoception, the ability to detect your own internal state..On the pod are Penny Sarchet, Chelsea Whyte, Leah Crane, Jason Murugesu and Matthew Sparkes. To read about these stories and much more, subscribe at newscientist.com/podcasts.Events and discount codes:newscientist.com/pod20newscientist.com/lovenewscientist.com/courses See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Dr. Sharon Stills interviews Dr. David Jernigan, innovator in Induced Native Phage Therapy and practitioner of Biological Medicine about a little known but extremely powerful method of treating disease. Did you know we have not only a microbiome, but a phageome inside each of our bodies? What is this, and what is its significance for our health?  Is it possible to reverse disease without side effects, and without waiting for years of treatment? Dr. Jernigan takes our listeners on a journey to the microscopic in an effort to cure difficult manifestations of disease.

Mallory Smiths book, Salt in my Soul was published posthumously by her mother, Diane Shader Smith (husband Mark) after she died from CF at the age of 25 years old.  Smith died after a double lung transplant.  So many people have read her book.  I bought it years ago, but was never able to read it.  I have a mental block, lots of CF books sitting on my shelf that I can't read.  I am living this life, I am raising not one but two girls with cystic fibrosis.  I didn't think I could handle any of these books, but I bought them, and they sat on my shelf. Serendipity happened to me, as it always does with CF related incidents. I was on a  zoom webinar, got bored, and started looking at their Ads.  One popped out at me:  Lost Women of Science with NY Times reporter Katie Hafner. She did a four part series about Dr. Dorothy Anderson, who discovered in 1938, that CF existed.  So for whatever reason, it seemed time  to start reading all these books I had -- with my girls at 27 and 24 years old, it was time to delve into everything CF. At this time Diane Shader Smith and Director, Will Battersby were debuting their film, Salt in my Soul.  It was Mallory's story on film.  It featured her videos, writings, her story.  I didn't know what to expect, but after watching it I felt like Diane was my CF Mom Soulmate and I had to talk to her.  That's where our story begins.In this podcast you'll hear from Diane and Will.  We talked about everything from Phage therapy that could have saved Mallory, to staying strong and pushing for more in the world of CF.  Will Battersby: @Battersby4WillFilm link: saltinmysouldoc.comDiane Shader Smith: @dianeshadersmthTrailer link: https://youtu.be/m5779DFldHAFilm: @SaltInMySoulDocMore on phage therapy: @YalePhageSalt in My Soul Website: https://saltinmysouldoc.com/ 

To claim credit for this episode, visit: Mayo Clinic Talks Podcast: Genes & Your Health Guests: Gina A. Suh, M.D. Host: Denise M. Dupras, M.D., Ph.D. What is Phage Therapy? When was it discovered? Where is it used? We know about antibiotics, antifungals, and antivirals, but this is a whole new world! Have no fear, this episode is here from the Genes & Your Health miniseries to help demystify all there is to know about Phages. Connect with the Mayo Clinic's School of Continuous Professional Development online at https://ce.mayo.edu/ or on Twitter @MayoMedEd.