Phage Ultra-Purification Methods
New Methods of Bacteriophage Preparation Are the Next Step In Developing and Standardizing Phage Therapy for Clinical Use.
Bacteriophage ("phage") are viruses that infect and kill bacteria. Phage therapy has been in use since the early 20th century, but is not prevalent in western medicine in part due to a lack of purity in samples of phage for clinical use.
In particular, many researchers have neglected and failed to account for important toxic indicators in phage preparation, hindering the safety and efficacy of phage therapy.
To solve this problem, Dr. Dwayne Roach's lab has developed novel phage purification techniques to prepare and standardize high-quality and clinically safe phage samples for intravenous use in patients.
Relying on a combination of classical techniques, modern filtration processes, phage selection, and bioinformatic genomic analysis, these methods provide a practical protocol for phage isolation, cultivation, and purification for treatment in humans. Dr. Roach and his team are already using their methods to cultivate liter-scale phage samples for clinical use at local hospitals on an emergency basis.
The World Health Organization has described antimicrobial resistance as “a problem so serious that it threatens the achievements of modern medicine.” For this reason, phage therapy needs to be available to fight antibiotic-resistant infections going forward, and Dr. Roach's standardized purification methods are the next step in making phage therapy safer and more effective for clinical use.
Benefits
- Standardized, reproducible, and scalable
- Up to 64,000 treatment doses at 10 plaque-forming units in one batch
- Endotoxin levels within human therapeutic regulatory limits
Lead Inventor
Dwayne Roach, Ph.D.
IP Protection
• US Provisional Patent Application No. 62/983,453
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