SBIR Topic 131: Development of Bacteriophage for Treatment of Mycobacterial Infections

Tolka Al Therapeutics aims to build a fully personalized and data-driven phage therapy platform that can treat any patient with M. abscessus and is not limited by a library approach. Phages will be isolated for each patient to ensure optimal efficacy and high specificity. A continuous software-defined environmental sampling and phage screening process will be implemented to achieve high coverage of phages. A fast phage isolation pipeline will be built using liquid handling robots and controlled by intelligent software systems. All data from all steps of the phage screening, isolation, and testing processes will be recorded electronically and analyzed using automated pipelines and software data analysis tools. Using this data, the laboratory process will be optimized to ensure a high phage isolation rate and high throughput, leading to lower costs. Unlike other approaches where a patient can be denied treatment due to a lack of phages, our pipeline's primary goal is the isolation of phages specific to each new patient.