Anthony W. Maresso

I cofounded and helped establish a group called TAILOR (Tailored Antibacterials and Innovative Laboratories for Phage Research) at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, as a not-for-profit service center to source and prepare phages for patients with serious, drug-resistant infections. Since there are no approved phage drugs for infections by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the expanded access pathway is used for individual treatments via granting of approval through an investigational New Drug (IND) application. Thus far, TAILOR and its clinical partners in different institutions across the U.S. have worked together to treat a total of 12 patients using this pathway. Now I am working at KU Leuven in Belgium as a researcher in Laboratory of Gene Technology. I am hoping to bring phage therapeutics to more people across the world in this position as well as solve scientific problems in the implementation of phage therapy. What is unique about Belgium is its regulatory framework. Phages can be delivered in the form of Magistral preparations (compounding pharmacy preparations in the U.S.) to the patient upon prescription by the treating surgeon. The active pharmaceutical ingredient (API)—the phages, of magistral formulations are prepared according to a monograph. In this way physicians can prescribe the personalized phage preparations while hospital pharmacists prepare and dispense these prescriptions with the API or APIs (as different phage APIs can be combined at the pharmacy).