The leadership team of the newly-founded Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH) at UC San Diego visited the CPT on Jan 14-15, 2019. The team included Dr. Steffanie Strathdee (Co-director of IPATH; Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences, UCSD), Dr. Robert “Chip” Schooley (Co-director of IPATH; the lead infectious disease physician at UCSD), Elizabeth Lampley (IPATH program coordinator). Accompanying the IPATH team was Dr. Tom Patterson, the patient who received the phage treatment developed by the CPT and the US Navy’s USNMRC for his disseminated A. baumannii infection in 2016. The team visited the CPT laboratories, interacted with the CPT lab members, and met with the CPT leadership team to discuss future collaborations in the area of modern phage therapy.
During their visit, Dr. Schooley delivered a well-attended seminar titled “Bacteriophage Therapy for Serious Bacterial Infections: Back to the Future”. The seminar was followed by a round table discussion on the challenges and policies surrounding phage application as human medicine.
The IPATH team also attended the first awarding of the Thomas L. Patterson Graduate Fellowship to Adriana Hernandez Morales, the CPT graduate student who was the main hands-on worker during the 2016 clinical intervention. The award was presented to Ms. Hernandez Morales by Dr. Patterson, Dr. Strathdee and Texas A&M University President Michael Young. The ceremony was also attended by Dr. Patrick Stover, Vice Chancellor and Dean of Agriculture, and the IPATH and the CPT leadership. The Fellowship is personally funded by Dr. Strathdee and Dr. Patterson to encourage graduate-level research on phage at the CPT.