Team BATTLE

Instagram: @gemsteambattle

Introduction: 

Around the world, bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, contributing to millions of deaths each year. Team BATTLE is exploring bacteriophages (phages) -- viruses that infect bacteria -- as a potential alternative to traditional antibiotics for treating infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria.  

About US:

We are a team of 13 undergraduate students in the Gemstone Honors Program. With guidance from our faculty mentors, Dr. Weitz and Dr. Dickey, we combine experimental and computational approaches to match phages with bacterial hosts for more effective treatment strategies. Our long-term goal is to build a closed-loop, active-learning pipeline in which a computational model predicts phage-host interaction outcomes and our lab team validates those predictions experimentally, feeding results back into the model to continuously improve performance.

Timeline:

Objective:

Over the next three years, our goal is to implement a closed-loop, adaptive learning pipeline to develop a system of computational models that can accurately match phages to bacterial hosts and ultimately improve the speed at which phage-based treatments can be prepared. Achieving this will require many time - and material-intensive laboratory experiments, along with significant computational resources. Access to the Zaratan HPC cluster will provide the computing power needed to build and run our model, while our wet - lab work depends on supplies and consumables that add up quickly.

These materials are costly, but with your support, we can secure what we need to launch our pipeline and work toward a future where fewer people die from antibiotic-resistant infections. We aim to raise $2,500 to begin purchasing essential supplies, train our experimental team, and enable our computational team to start building and testing the model.  

Gifts in support of the University of Maryland are accepted and managed by the University of Maryland College Park Foundation, Inc., an affiliated 501(c)(3) organization authorized by the Board of Regents.  Contributions to the University of Maryland are tax-deductible as allowed by law. Please see your tax advisor for details.