Welcome to the Talking Precision Medicine podcast. In this series, we sit down with experts on the application of AI and big data analytics in the drug discovery space. Our guests are innovators, business decision makers and thought leaders at the intersection of data and therapeutics. We discuss the promise, practice, challenges, and myths of AI in precision medicine. This show is brought to you by Genialis, and Rafael, our CEO, is your host.

Genialis is focused on data integration and predictive modeling of disease biology to help accelerate the discovery and de-risk the development of novel therapeutics.

Today’s news is dominated by the corona virus and COVID-19 pandemic. Rightfully so. 

But today we’re bringing you a story of another class of viruses, called Phage. Phage are viruses that find and kill bacteria, and Felix is a Bay Area biotech harnessing the power of phage to fight the scourge of antibiotic resistant infections.

So join our conversation with founder and CEO, Dr. Rob McBride, from wherever you have socially distanced yourself or locked down on quarantine, and learn about the viruses that are actually saving lives.

Episode highlights:

• Phage are viruses that exclusively infect and kill bacterias
• What is unique about Felix’s approach, we are really good at targeting phage to virulence-factor. These are elements that the bacteria have that makes them more harmful
• The technology is in service of helping patients. Whenever there is a question, we use that as our guideline. Is this development helping us make something that is gonna improve someone’s life?
• We can find the right phage for the particular factor more quickly and for less money than any other technology that we are aware of.
• The problem of resistant bacterias is alarming now, and projections for the future are even more alarming. In the US last year, more than 35,000 people died from bacterial infections that are resistant to an antibiotic. Globally the number was close to 700,000. WHO predicts that if we don’t do anything by 2050, there will be about 10M deaths per year from these infections.