Phage therapy is the use of bacteriophages for therapeutic purposes. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria with high specificity. Phage therapy was introduced in the early 1900s, but nowadays, with the increase of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, phage therapy has proven to be of great importance and a potential alternative to antibiotics, not only in the field of medicine, but also in veterinary science and agriculture. In our lab, we are interested in understanding the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms of phage therapy inside human cells infected with different pathogens of interest, and we also aim to engineer recombinant bacteriophages with improved properties to be used for future therapy or as rapid diagnostics for bacterial infections. For our research, we use human cell culture and human cell biology methods, microbiology, biochemistry, molecular & synthetic biology and advanced microscopy.

Current group members: 

	Dr Antonia Sagona, Group Leader		Gurneet Dhanoa, PhD student
	Michael Tadesse, PhD student		Shanthini Thamaraiselvan, Research Fellow
	Joshua Williams, PhD student		Nathan Burton, PhD student
	Emilie Cummerson, placement student		Dan White, PhD student
	Jeannelle Quartey, MBio student		Robert Ramirez Garcia, PhD student
	Lucie Winn, MBio student

Sagona lab news

Antimicrobial surfaces applications

New publication in Sagona lab, funded by BBSRC Future Leader Fellowship

New publication from Sagona lab in collaboration with the University of Loughborough: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4923/11/9/475

New publication from Sagona lab funded by Newton British Council award: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7235909/

New publication from Sagona lab funded by BBSRC Future Leader Fellowship: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65867-4

The first PhD student from Sagona lab, Christian Moller-Olsen, defended his PhD thesis successfully! Well done Christian!

New publication from Sagona lab funded by BBSRC Future Leader Fellowship: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-7737/10/6/556/pdf

New review article in collaboration with Dr Aidan Brown from the University of Edinburgh: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8490754/pdf/fmicb-12-724767.pdf

New publication in collaboration with Professor Matthew I. Gibson (Chemistry and WMS), University of Warwick: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.biomac.1c01187

New publication from the lab in collaboration with Dr Lauren Cowley, University of Bath and Dr Aidan Brown, University of Edinburgh: Transposable Element Insertions into the Escherichia coli Polysialic Acid Gene Cluster Result in Resistance to the K1F Bacteriophage (asm.org)

Gurneet from Sagona lab published her work! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9372555/