A patient’s legacy: Researchers work to make phage therapy less of a long shot

The researcher couldn’t get Mallory Smith’s story out of her mind. Smith was a 25-year-old cystic fibrosis patient, and she was near death at a Pittsburgh hospital, her lungs overwhelmed by bacteria. All antibiotics had failed. As a last resort, her father suggested an experimental treatment known as phage therapy.

That meant giving her viruses known as bacteriophages — phages for short — which naturally parasitize bacteria. But not any phage would do. Smith needed one perfectly evolved to kill the microbes in her lungs. Urgent messages were beamed around the world, over email and Twitter, from one phage researcher to another. Was there someone, somewhere, who had the right virus tucked away in a fridge at the back of a lab?

That’s how Jessica Sacher heard about Smith. As a grad student experimenting on phages at the University of Georgia, she’d stumbled across a . She mentioned it to a friend she’d met through swing dancing, a tech consultant and developer named Jan Zheng. He knew there had to be a more efficient way to find the