With antimicrobial resistance a rising global crisis, western medicine’s interest is turning to phage therapy as an alternative to antibiotics. Challenging past uncertainty in phage therapy’s commercial viability, recent developments such as highly positive results of compassionate use cases in the US has excited the field and the next step is successful phase II clinical trials.

Phage Futures Congress is a translational phage therapy conference where Steffanie Strathdee, Tom Patterson, the FDA, and others will discuss how we move phage therapy forward in the US. A number of A Smaller Flea authors will be speaking or in attendance: Jessica Sacher of Phage Directory, Ben Chan of Yale Univeristy, Shawna McCallin of PhageForward. I am pleased to announce that I have also joined the Scientific Advisory Board for the congress

Take a look at the agenda here.

The Phage Futures Congress will bring together peers from biotech companies and academia, along with experts from regulatory bodies, pharmaceutical companies and government institutions, to discuss how to actively progress clinical science and viable routes to market. You will learn about:

• Regulatory guidance to achieve clinical data from Cara Fiore, FDA
• Strategies to access the market via the veterinary, personalized medicine and traditional pharmaceutical routes
• Insights into investment drivers from NIH and Boehringer Ingelheim
• The facts on how to manufacture GMP phage
• Approaches to overcome multi-drug resistance such as combining phage therapy and antibiotics
• Phage use in new indications such as IBD

“The Phage Futures Congress has the potential to act as a catalyst to further cooperative and  collaborative efforts to develop alternate Phage based approaches to the antibiotic crisis. In addition, the location in the Washington DC area will facilitate an opportunity for Government Agencies, responsible for public health, such as the NIH, FDA, USDA and DOD to participate and interact with educational research groups and biotechnology companies developing phage therapies and initiating clinical testing.” – Carl Merril, Adaptive Phage Therapeutics

You can register here.