Alexandros Pantalis
Cofounder & CEO at Phagos, Phagos biotech
21 Jan 2026Europes Newest Unicorn Joins, Eleven Labs Eyes $11B, Sequoia Looks To Anthropic, $1M X Article Payou
Alexandros Pantalis Introduces Fagos
Fagos co-founder and CEO Alexandros Pantalis joins and introduces the company he founded five years ago with his co-founder Adele (CTO), stating the mission "to end bacterial disease." He frames bacterial disease as the second leading cause of death for humans and a top killer of animals; the interview continues beyond this part.
Phagos: Fighting Antibiotic Resistance with Bacteriophages
Phagos' co-founder frames antibiotic resistance — already 1 in 6 human infections resistant and growing 10-15% a year — as an existential threat that could end modern medicine within 15 years. Instead of antibiotics, the company uses bacteriophages, bacteria's natural predators, combined with AI and modern microbiology to match the right phage to each infection. He says they just raised a €25M Series A and are the first company authorized in Europe to sell personalized phage treatments as mainstream veterinary pharmaceuticals. Asked about competition, he notes roughly 150 phage players worldwide (about 20 in animal health) and says Phagos differs by building a personalized phage 'cocktail' per farm rather than a broad-spectrum fix that would repeat antibiotics' resistance mistakes.
Scaling Personalized Phages: 1M Animals Healed and the Path to Humans
He describes three phases of proving the technology — in vitro, in vivo, then real commercial settings — and says Phagos has cleared the first two, with one million animals healed in just a few months. The company started with chickens, moved into pigs, and plans cows, targeting billions of animals in a $2 trillion animal-production market where roughly 20% of output is lost to disease each year. The endgame remains human health: the data and experience from animals will make the technology universalizable for any life form. He also explains AI became integral to their inference after founding the company before the ChatGPT moment, publicly thanks the multidisciplinary team across field work, drug production, bioinformatics and microbiology, and signs off.