Phage matching for antibiotic-resistant infections
When antibiotics have stopped working, a bacteriophage—a virus that infects only certain bacteria—may still kill the strain. Helix Health finds the phages that match one patient’s isolate, confirms them, and prepares them for the treating team.
The method
We grow the patient’s isolate as a thin, even layer of bacteria on agar—a lawn. Then a drop of each phage in our library goes onto it.
01
Screen
Where a phage infects and kills the bacteria, the lawn clears and the agar shows through. Where it doesn’t, the lawn stays opaque. Some spots clear only partly; we record those as turbid.
A clear spot is a lead, not an answer. A spot can clear without the phage multiplying, so every lead is tested again before it goes any further.
02
Confirm
Each lead is re-tested for efficiency of plating, then grown with the isolate in liquid culture to see whether it holds bacterial growth down over time.
Definition
It compares how many plaques a phage forms on the patient’s isolate with how many it forms on the strain it was grown on. A high ratio means the phage truly multiplies on this isolate; a low one means it barely does.
Fig. 2 — Phage plaques on a real agar plate. Each round, darker zone is a plaque, where a phage killed the bacterial lawn. Photo: Wazzzup7up, “M. smegmatis plaque”, Wikimedia Commons, public domain; cropped.
03
Combine
Bacteria can become resistant to a single phage. Where several phages work, we test them together and choose a combination that makes resistance harder to come by.
Fig. 3 — Growth suppression, schematic. The isolate grown alone (grey) and with a phage combination (ink). The shape is illustrative; not experimental data.
04
Prepare
The chosen phages are produced, purified, and tested for sterility and endotoxin, then released with full documentation for the treating team and the regulator.
What happens next is not our decision.
Produced
Purified
Tested for sterility
Tested for endotoxin
Released with full documentation
Commitments
01
Phage therapy is not an approved standard treatment in the United States or the European Union. It is used case by case, under the expanded-access or compassionate-use rules where the patient is treated.
02
We supply a matched preparation and the data behind it. Whether and how to use it is decided by the patient’s doctors, with the patient.
03
We share every screen with the treating team, including the phages that did not work, so each decision is made on the full picture.
Request
Tell us about the case. A microbiologist will reply with what to send and how to ship the isolate.
Do not include patient names, dates of birth, or other identifiers.
