Prof. Katrine Whiteson from the University of California, USA will join the Targeting Phage Therapy 2026 congress and will give a presentation entitled ‘The Human Virome in Chronic Infection: What Patient Phages Teach Us About Therapeutic Phage Design‘ during the congress. 

Antibiotic-resistant infections remain a major global health challenge, and bacteriophages offer a promising complement to conventional antibiotics. Our laboratory studies how evolutionary and ecological processes shape phage susceptibility across multidrug-resistant pathogens. We have isolated and sequenced dozens of phages targeting clinically relevant strains in Southern California and used experimental evolution, comparative genomics, and high-throughput kinetic assays to investigate phage trainability, host-range expansion, and phage–host co-evolution. In parallel, we identified synergistic interactions between medium-chain fatty acids, phages, and antibiotics that reshape phage susceptibility across diverse pathogens, suggesting that environmental modulation can expand effective host range and alter resistance trajectories. These discoveries have informed the development of multi-phage therapeutic cocktails, susceptibility assays, and adaptive treatment strategies. As compassionate-use phage therapy efforts expand across the United States, there is growing recognition that ecological context and evolutionary dynamics may strongly influence therapeutic outcomes. Building on these studies, we recently completed our first compassionate-use phage therapy case at UC Irvine, treating chronic MRSA sinusitis using a phage isolated from Southern California wastewater and produced in our laboratory. This talk will highlight how studies of phage evolution, chemical modulation, and susceptibility landscapes are informing personalized phage therapy strategies.

Targeting Phage Therapy 2026
June 9-10, 2026
 – Valencia, Spain

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