I-Corps: Bacteriophage Platform

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is an efficacious alternative for antibiotics and in treating antibiotic resistant bacteria in a number of fields, including, healthcare, self-care, agriculture, sanitation, animal health, and research. The CDC estimates that in 2013 more than 2 million people had an antibiotic resistant infection, and 23,000 people died due to antibiotic resistance. The costs to society of antibiotic resistance are $20 billion in direct medical costs, and as much as $35 billion in lost productivity-these are the savings in healthcare alone. The potential impact on self-care is a competitive and safe alternative to OTC treatments for bacterial related issues, such as acne, which affects more than 80% of the population at some point in their lives, and has a market size of $644 million. The potential impact on the animal health industry would be a replacement for growth-promoting antibiotics.This I-Corps project core technology is a software and hardware platform that combines a method for creating precision disease models with a novel solution for the discovery of a narrow band lytic bacteriophage. This discovery platform enables the elimination of many of the bottlenecks and short falls of traditional phage and antibiotic product discovery to improve isolation rates of unique, diverse anti-infective candidates. When used in conjunction with regular metagenomic monitoring of a target environment, the technology is able to model a custom phage cocktail to ensure a specific functional profile using combinatorics.