This Project Grant award from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, part of the Discovery and Applied Research for Technological Innovations to Improve Human Health (CFDA 93.286) program, provides $128,461 to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to develop an adaptive framework for rapidly synthesizing and reconfiguring synthetic bacteriophages (phages) to counter antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
The key objectives are to: 1) optimize an E. coli cell-free system to produce phages that infect Pseudomonas hosts, demonstrating the platform's ability to synthesize phages against a broad range of pathogens; and 2) decompress existing Pseudomonas phage genomes into distinct reading frames using in vitro genome assembly, and synthesize the decompressed phages in the E. coli cell-free system. This innovative approach aims to create modular phage genomes compatible with interchangeable parts, enabling on-demand phage synthesis for phage therapy development against existing and emerging antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
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