Portable device for rapid identification of locally sourced phage for use in phage therapy applications

Multidrug-resistant organisms (MDRO) are increasingly omnipresent in the healthcare settings of the public and military. Pathogens of interest in particular are those in the ESKAPEE group. As the prevalence of MDRO has increased, the number of new antibiotics to treat these infections has decreased. This has caused the rise of organisms resistant to all known antibiotics. To solve this, bacteriophage have been suggested as a treatment route for MDRO. Bacteriophage are highly specific. This is both a blessing and a burden as bacteriophage will continue to infect an MDRO for an extended time, but it might not infect a similar species or strain. Isolating bacteriophage has historically been a months-long, labor intensive, and expensive process. We propose to develop a portable device for phage hunting that removes the labor, the time, and the expense of the current process through automation. The device will allow the user to input their sample, input their bacterial target, and collect sterile, lytic phage cocktail in <4 hrs. This is a dramatic reduction in the time (<4 hrs vs weeks/months), cost (est <$100/target vs thousands), and labor (<5 mins vs weeks/months) to perform a phage hunt for a phage cocktail for phage therapies.