Synthetic and cell biology for phage therapy

The problem of antimicrobial resistance is serious and new approaches are necessary to tackle this. One of these, is phage therapy, the use of bacteriophages -viruses that can specifically attack their host bacteria- for therapeutic purposes. The understanding of how phage therapy works in human cells level is very crucial for the progress of this approach. With the advances of synthetic biology, we can now engineer “synthetic” bacteriophages in the lab, with the preferred characteristics, which can enable us to visualize the route of bacteriophages inside human cells and estimate the effect of the interaction between bacteria, bacteriophages and human cells. In my talk, I will describe the work that we have done in my lab towards this direction and I will present how a combination of synthetic and cell biology methods can open new horizons in the study of the mechanisms of phage therapy.