7 thoughts on “P4 – Brent

  1. With testing phage in clinical trials, what are the possible side effects involved in the short run and long run?

  2. Hey guys, thank you all for commenting on my presentation! Our study is not centered on the discovery of the phage, but more so on the isolation and characterization of it. Our phage was able to infect a non-pathogenic bacteria of M.smeg which has been known to cause other diseases such as Tuberculosis. In the future, our sequenced phage could possibly be tested with similar Mycobacterium phages to target other similar pathogenic diseases. The main part about performing clinical trials is that it could possibly lead to more funding and spread awareness of this treatment. Obviously, there are risks to doing phage therapy since it is not entirely FDA approved because the effectiveness varies. Hopefully, phage therapy can be distributed (taken orally, skin patches, injections, etc…) just as widespread as antibiotics but this will take some time solidify the treatment. This sample was obtained in the beginning of the semester and is important because it takes time to incubate and prepare the DNA for multiple experiments. There is always the risk of contamination. We expected to see a phage that infected M.smeg (which it did). We also expected it to have a lytic cycle (extremely important for phage therapy). We wanted to see the O cluster since that fits the morphology of our phage, but that did not happen in the PCR.

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