Roadmap for Phage technologies

What are we trying to achieve and why? What is the problem we are trying to solve?

Increasing product safety.

What are the scientific and technological challenges (knowledge gaps needing to be addressed)?

Understand direct and indirect effects on non-targeted commensal bacteria
Consistent research methodology to enable evaluation of efficacy and safety.
Genomic information missing (70% of their genomes is hypothetical proteins)
Detect elements that can allow transfer of AMR genes.

What approaches could/should be taken to address the research question?

An alternative to engineering from scratch is to modify existing phages to improve their safety profile.
Identify Phage “virulence determinants.
Improving bioinformatic based on structures rather than on sequence. similarities by using structural prediction tools (e.g. alpha fold-2).

What else needs to be done before we can solve this need?

Understanding the link of phages with healthy animal.

Existing knowledge including successes and failures