Chip Schooley & Graham Hatfull: the state of phage therapy (& what HIV can teach us)

Chip Schooley (UC San Diego, IPATH) and Graham Hatfull (University of Pittsburgh) join us to discuss why phage therapy needs biologists and clinicians collaborating — and what the HIV field’s playbook can teach us.

Topics covered:

• Why they organized an academic phage conference in Washington, D.C.

• The state of in vitro phage assays and the reproducibility problem

• How to design phage clinical trials that actually teach us something

• Phage resistance, fitness trade-offs, and the role of the immune system

• What HIV’s journey from 1988 to 1998 tells us about where phage therapy is headed

• Why synthetic biology is the future of phage therapeutics

• The need for young scientists entering the field

Guests:

Chip Schooley — Co-founder, IPATH Phage Therapy Center, UC San Diego. Physician behind the Tom Patterson case. HIV research veteran.

Graham Hatfull — University of Pittsburgh. Runs the world’s largest phage collection. Creator of SEA-PHAGES.

Hosts:

Jessica Sacher & Joe Campbell

Links:

IAS-USA: The conference Chip & Graham describe in the episode was sponsored by the International Antiviral Society-USA (Executive Director: Donna Jacobsen): https://www.iasusa.org/