Hammack’s Tool Tests Thousands of Candidates for Best Results

Aeron Tynes Hammack, Interim Facility Director of the Nanofabrication Facility at the Molecular Foundry, is applying tools developed for quantum computing to a surprising new challenge: combating antibiotic resistance. Hammack is leveraging a high-throughput screening process, co-founded with Nick Conley at EpiBiome, to accelerate the development of bacteriophage therapies, viruses that target and destroy antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This work has already progressed to clinical trials, with biotech company Locus Biosciences evaluating a phage-based treatment developed using Hammack’s automated system. A recent paper published in Nature Communications describes the automated process that he built at EpiBiome, the biotech company he co-founded with Nick Conley, that was brought to full production scale by researchers at Locus Biosciences. “Phage therapy predates small-molecule antibiotics,” Hammack notes, explaining that modern diagnostics now enable the precision needed to overcome historical limitations of this century-old approach. The automated…