Enabling generalized phage therapy to treat secondary infections in COVID-19 (CRADA Final Report)

Technical Report · Tue Jun 01 04:00:00 EDT 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1784308· OSTI ID:1784308

Roux, Simon ^[1]; McBride, Robert ^[2]

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1. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); USDOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI), Berkeley, CA (United States)
2. Felix Biotechnology, Inc., San Francisco, CA (United States)

COVID-19 is a global health threat, with 32 millions infected and more than 500,000 deaths in the U.S. alone. A key aspect of COVID-19 deaths is bacterial secondary infections, with Staphylococcus aureus, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa identified as some of the major causative pathogens. Phage therapy, i.e., the administration of bacteriophages (viruses infecting these bacterial pathogens) to patients offers a complementary solution to antibiotics with multiple key advantages. Felix Biotechnology’s is developing a high-throughput platform to identify phages that not only kill pathogens, but also drive targeted trade-off of pathogenic phenotypes such as reduced virulence and antibiotic resistance, at a fraction of the time and R&D cost of any competitor. In this project, collaboration with scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory enabled Felix Biotechnology to establish robust analysis pipeline to investigate phage-host interactions in complex samples. These should enable a quick and robust identification of promising phages and key genetic determinants for therapy applications, paving the way towards a streamlined and safe use of phages in the clinic.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Felix Biotechnology, Inc., San Francisco, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231
• OSTI ID: 1784308
• Report Number(s): LBNL-2001397; FP00011798
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES