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Regulation and importance of phage therapy to food safety bacteriology: An industry view |
R. M. CARLTON, Exponential Biotherapies, Inc, 150 Main St., Port Washington, NY 11050 We present data on specific applications of phages as biological control agents in the food industry. We discuss the numerous advantages they offer for these purposes (particularly compared to antibiotics), such as: (i) that they clone themselves to high titer on their targets; (ii) that they generally don’t cross species boundaries, thus won’t harm bystander flora, and (iii) that they are “green”, in that, upon their decomposition in the physical environment (or the internal milieu of a food production animal), their proteins break down to amino acids and their DNA breaks down to nucleic acids, thus becoming, literally, nutrients for the biosphere. The latter two points are important from the regulatory perspective. Additional regulatory considerations explained are the necessity for: (i) documenting the absence, in the candidate phages, of genes that determine antibiotic resistance or bacterial virulence, or of genes that allow integration into the bacterial DNA (lysogeny); and for (ii) demonstrating that the phages do not transduce (i.e., do not incorporate fragments of the host bacterial DNA into the DNA of the progeny phages, which could then be spread to other bacteria).
Session 37, Phage therapy as it applies to food public health bacteriology
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