CONWAY, SC (WBTW) – One group of Coastal Carolina University students are a part of a global project called SEAPHAGES that’s helping them to have the potential to save lives one day.
Dr. Dan Williams says his students have already found eight viruses this year alone, and this is his third year in the program.
“It’s a possibility that what you do one day could save a life,” said Colin Evangelisto, one CCU biology student in the program. “That’s, you know, an exciting thing to think about.”
When Colin Evangelisto signed up for Dr. Dan Williams’s biology class at Coastal Carolina University, he never thought he’d be a part of a program that’s already saved lives across the nation.
It’s called SEAPHAGES, and it’s allowing students to find new viruses, or phages, that infect bacteria from samples picked up in our own backyard.
“We’re learning a whole lot about how phages work, about the evolution of phages and if they’re has been other phages that have been used for a thing called phage therapy, right, so treating antibiotic resistant diseases, right, phages are thought to be used or can be used to treat these types of diseases,” said Dr. Williams.
They spend their first semester discovering the viruses, and then spend the second looking at where all the genes are in the gene sequence.
Dr. Williams is most excited about the third semester that’s developed within the program, that looks at the function of specific genes.
CCU is now only one of five schools in the nation running the new third semester sequence, that allows the students to clone the genes in the project and look at what their functions are.
“They have to purify it away from everything else, make sure they have a clonal population of it, and then amplify it up so they have a whole bunch more of that clonal population of phages, and then we get to do fun stuff with it, like get DNA from it, and get electron micrographs, so an image of the phage,” he said.
The SEAPHAGES program is designed to help in phage therapy, where doctors can give these viruses to people with bacterial illnesses and it will target the bacteria making the person ill.
In fact, one phage discovered in the national program has already treated one patient with cystic fibrosis.
“Bacteria are getting stronger and stronger, you know, antibiotics are becoming more and more of a problem, you know, trying to find strong enough drugs to fight stronger and stronger diseases,” said Evangelisto.
Viruses that CCU students have found will be named and placed in a national database called Phages DB.
Dr. Williams says the program at CCU gets support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland.
