1.D.318.  The Synthetic Delivery M13 Phage (SDM13P) Family 

Several agents, such as antimicrobial peptides and nanomaterials, are highly bactericidal but are also cytotoxic, resulting in major side effects and low clinical utility. IA Chen and her co-workers studied the use of synthetic, non-lytic M13 phages for direct delivery of antimicrobial agents to bacterial cells (Peng et al. 2020). Phage delivery of gold nanoparticles enabled photothermal ablation of bacterial cells, and the host range can be engineered, as demonstrated by a broad-range construct carrying the antimicrobial but nephrotoxic peptide polymyxin B (Peng and Chen 2021). The designs were validated in mouse models of Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection, suggest that engineering phages to deliver antimicrobial agents is a potentially versatile approach to create potent therapeutic agents, and other possibilities exist (Lai et al. 2021).  M13 phages also represent an attractive platform for vaccine delivery as natural bionanomaterials (Chen et al. 2025). For example, bifunctional phage particles augment CD40 activation and enhance lymph node-targeted delivery of personalized neoantigen vaccines (Chen et al. 2025).