Aeron Tynes Hammack, a physicist at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry, is solving two vastly different problems using the same toolkit: developing qubits for quantum computers and crafting bacteriophage therapies to fight infections that antibiotics can no longer touch. The through-line connecting his seemingly disparate work is an elegant one—the need for automated experimental tools that can rapidly test thousands of candidates and identify which one works best.
This convergence of quantum physics, biology, and nanotechnology matters because antibiotic resistance has become one of medicine's most pressing challenges. Bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria—offer a promising alternative, but they've been overshadowed by conventional antibiotics for nearly a century. What's changed now is our ability to match the right phage to the right pathogen with precision and speed.
Hammack and his colleagues have pioneered a high-throughput screening process that transforms how phage therapy candidates are discovered. At the Molecular Foundry, a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility, Hammack uses a quantum information science cluster tool that combines advanced robotics and artificial intelligence to rapidly design, manufacture, and test candidates—dramatically accelerating the traditional trial-and-error cycle of research and development. This same robotic, AI-driven approach was previously adapted by Hammack at EpiBiome, a biotech company he co-founded with Nick Conley, and has since been brought to full production scale by Locus Biosciences, which is now conducting clinical trials to evaluate a bacteriophage-based treatment developed through this streamlined process. The work was recently described in a paper published in Nature Communications.
The history of phage therapy reveals why this moment is so significant. Bacteriophages were discovered between 1915 and 1917—more than a decade before penicillin emerged. Soviet scientists spent decades developing phage therapies, but they encountered a fundamental limitation: phages are remarkably specific hunters. A single phage doesn't kill an entire bacterial species; it targets only certain strains within that species. To treat a single, uncomplicated E. coli infection, a patient might need four to six different phages to cover the necessary range of bacterial activity.
Conventional antibiotics, by contrast, work like grenades—broad-spectrum weapons that kill multiple pathogenic species at once. This is crucial for emergency medicine: when someone arrives at the emergency room with a suspected bacterial infection, doctors can immediately reach for a single drug confident it will eliminate E. coli, Klebsiella, Staph aureus, and other common culprits, often before diagnostic results confirm the infection. That speed and breadth of action has made antibiotics indispensable to modern medicine.
But the phage's precision is also its greatest strength. A phage therapy targeting E. coli won't induce resistance in Staph aureus or any other pathogen—it operates like a sniper, not a grenade. And now, for the first time in a century, the missing piece has arrived: modern diagnostics. Rapid sequencing technology and sensitive pathogen identification now make it possible to identify infections quickly enough that precision phage therapy becomes medically practical. The full vision, Hammack suggests, points toward a future where patients arriving at the emergency room receive diagnostics so rapid and accurate that targeted phage therapy becomes the treatment of choice, offering both efficacy and the elimination of collateral antimicrobial resistance.