For those of you who are interested in becoming phage hunters (maybe you've read about us in Tom Ireland's new book), I am pleased to announce that we will be once again giving out kits in November 2023.

In the last few years, we have isolated >1,000 phages, many from samples taken by citizen phage hunters. A subset of these phages are now assisting efforts to treat patients in Australia, while we wait for the UK to establish a viable regulatory framework for compassionate phage use. There is ongoing discussions with phage therapy providers in Canada, US and Singapore to house our phage collection. Truly, the phages you discover are being made available around the world to treat patients in need!

When the Citizen Phage Library project was established, I hadn't quite fully understood the challenge of securing research funding for phage biobanking projects! Many traditional funding routes for UK research do not support biobanking projects, despite recognising both the huge potential benefit for phage therapeutics and the need for large collections and infrastructure to support it. As a result, the project ran out of money in early 2023. We lost a couple of key team members and reduced workloads to the bare minimum to keep the project on life support.

However, I'm delighted to say that thanks to a recent InnovateUK grant, we will once again be able to continue running for 30 months from November 2023. This grant includes an extensive sampling campaign to find phages against Ps. aeruginosa, E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus so sampling kits will be made available for order through the website. If you want to get involved, sign up as a phage hunter and we'll send out an email when kits are available to order!