phage

Have you ever heard of proximity ligation? We knew of it in research form back in the day, but not that it had been commercialized until this summer. It’s not every day we come across a powerful new genomics tool on this program. Which begs the question, where have Ivan Liachko and his company, Phase Genomics, been hiding?

The company received a grant this summer from the Bill Gates Foundation as well as the NIH to pursue phage therapeutics. That’s using viruses to go after bacterial infections, particularly those which are developing antibiotic resistance.

The company is also using its cool new platform for cytogenetics. There are over 2 billion cancer samples stored in FFPE which cannot be traditionally cytogenetically profiled. However, Phase’s proximity ligation technology has no issue with the fact that the formallin breaks up DNA. How can this be?

Speaking of platform, this new tech is just a kit, not an instrument. There are low barriers to entry.

Ivan joins us to explain how this new genomics tool takes researchers and clinical applications into fresh new territory.

“We’ve figured out a way to capture a unique type of genetic information. Our technology tells you which parts of the genome are touching which other parts of the genome. Which sounds like a crazy piece of information. It’s extremely useful in solving a number of problems. You can solve things in creative and unique ways that in some cases are completely impossible with other methods."