Next
Fish aquaculture
The same platform, re-matched to pathogens in sea bream, tilapia and salmon.
Kills the pathogen.Nothing else.
Farm-specific phage therapy designed to replace the massive use of antibiotics and chemicals in shrimp farming.
Nature's precision weapon against bacteria
Bacteriophages infect bacteria.Only bacteria.
Bacteriophages, or phages, are naturally occurring viruses that infect only bacteria. Phages are specific to their bacterial hosts, leaving non-target organisms unharmed.
They are among the most abundant and diverse biological entities on Earth, found wherever bacteria live. That specificity is what makes them a foundation for precise, targeted biological control.
- Specific to their bacterial hosts
- Naturally occurring, not engineered
- Self-replicating at the infection site
The problem
Shrimp can't be vaccinated.
Shrimp are invertebrates. No antibodies, no immune memory, no vaccine will ever work. When a bacterial pathogen such as Vibrio parahaemolyticus reaches a dense pond, mortality can reach 90 to 100 percent within the first month after stocking.
Bacterial disease is the main limiting factor on this industry. It destroys harvests, bankrupts farms and closes export markets, and once an outbreak takes hold the window to act is narrow.
- 6M+
- tons of farmed shrimp produced annually
- $60B+
- global market value, heading to $75B by 2028
- ~$3B
- lost to bacterial disease every year
The antibiotic spiral
The response to the disease has become a second disease.
Farmers have one tool, so they use it harder every season. Each turn of the cycle makes the next one worse.
- 01
Outbreak
Bacteria hit the pond and mortality climbs. Farmers reach for antibiotics and chemicals, often before there is any sign of disease.
- 02
Resistance
The bacteria that survive pass on their defences. Antimicrobial resistance develops in the pond, similar to the crisis facing hospitals worldwide.
- 03
Escalation
Antibiotics become less effective as resistance increases, so the doses go up. Higher concentrations, more medicated feed, more cost, less return each season.
- 04
Rejection
Residues reach levels above legal limits and shipments are refused in the EU, US and Japan. Up to 90 percent of what is administered ends up in the surrounding water.
Antibiotics and chemicals aren't solving the crisis. They are part of it.
The barrier
Between the treatment and the pathogen, a biofilm.
Bacteria in pond sediment build a protective matrix that shields them from antibiotics and from environmental stress. Whatever is applied at the surface has to get through it, and almost nothing does.
The solution
Matched to the farm, not to a catalogue.
We isolate the pathogens from a specific farm, match phages to those exact strains, and build a cocktail for that outbreak. The phages are isolated from nature, never engineered.
E1 · Isolate
Pathogens from the farm itself
Sampling the pond, the sediment and the affected animals to recover the bacterial strains actually causing the outbreak.
E2 · Match
Host-range screening
Every candidate phage is tested against every isolate. The hits define the cocktail for that farm.
E3 · Produce
Propagation to titre
The matched cocktail is grown, purified and quality-checked to a concentration that works at pond scale.
E4 · Deliver
Down to the sediment
Carried to the pond floor and released over time, alongside enzymes that break down the biofilm shielding the bacteria.
Delivered where it counts
The pond floor, not the water column.
01 · The problem with the water column
Conventional treatment is applied across the entire pond volume. By the time it reaches the sediment it has diluted to a concentration that does nothing.
02 · A capsule that sinks
AquaPhage delivers the matched cocktail inside a capsule that sinks. It carries the phages past the water column intact, to the sediment hot spots where bacterial load and biofilm concentrate.
03 · Released over time
At the floor the capsule releases the cocktail together with biofilm-degrading enzymes, steadily rather than all at once. Sustained, targeted bacterial control at the place the pathogens actually live.
Differentiation
No commercial phage treatment exists for aquaculture.This is the first.
Phage therapy is already on the market for poultry, swine and dairy farming, where it is delivered through feed and drinking water. Those products are fixed formulations built against reference strains, and once bacteria mutate a fixed product becomes less effective. We re-match the cocktail as the pathogen population changes.
Existing phage products
Poultry · swine · dairy farming
- Built for
- Land animals: poultry, swine, dairy
- Formulation
- Fixed, single-strain, off-the-shelf
- Phage source
- Some are synthetic or engineered
- Once bacteria mutate
- A fixed product becomes less effective
- Delivery method
- Feed and drinking water
AquaPhage
Aquaculture
- Built for
- Aquaculture, from the ground up
- Formulation
- Multi-phage cocktail, matched per farm
- Phage source
- Isolated from nature, not engineered
- Once bacteria mutate
- Cocktail is re-matched and updated
- Delivery method
- Capsule targeted to the pond sediment, released over time
Traction
Live outbreaks, not lab strains.
- 10+ pathogen strains
- Isolated from active outbreaks on Vietnamese farms, the strains currently destroying harvests, not archived reference cultures.
- 5+ phage cocktails
- Stable across the full range of pond conditions tested: temperature, salinity and pH.
- 12 industry engagements
- With global aquaculture companies and research institutes across Southeast Asia.
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
pH
- 10
- 15
- 20
- 25
- 30
- 35
- 40
- 45
- 50
- 55
- 60
Temperature (C°)
- 30
- 27.5
- 25
- 22.5
- 20
- 17.5
Salinity range (ppt)
- Field conditions in the pond
- Conditions tested against it
The lighter bar in each panel is the condition a working pond actually runs at. Every other bar shows the titre when conditions move away from it. Phage titre, PFU/ml (log10), mean with standard deviation; each panel keeps the axis range of the source assay chart, so bar heights are not comparable between panels.
Beyond shrimp
Shrimp is the first market, not the only one.
Next
Hatcheries
Where antibiotic use is heaviest and larval microbiome damage is most costly.
Longer term
Water bodies
Targeted biological control of bacteria in natural water systems and wastewater treatment.
Team
Four decades of shrimp health, and a virologist.
Dr. Ra’anan Ariav, DVM
Co-founder & CEO
Forty years in fish and shrimp health across 50+ farms worldwide. Built Phibro Aqua, the global aquaculture division of Phibro Animal Health, from scratch, and brought 25+ veterinary aquaculture products to market. Taught aquatic health at the Hebrew University for 25 years.
Dr. Ido Lavi
Co-founder & CTO
Virologist with 14+ years of research across plant, human and bacterial viruses. Principal investigator at the Shamir Research Institute and the University of Haifa; specialist in phage isolation, host-range characterisation and CRISPR-based methods. Leads the platform and core technology.
Contact
Talk to us.
AquaPhage is currently raising. For the investor deck or a technical conversation, contact us directly.
Business & investment
Dr. Ra’anan Ariav, DVM
Co-founder & CEO
Science & technology
Dr. Ido Lavi
Co-founder & CTO
Location
Shamir Research Institute
Katzrin, Israel
Offices and R&D centre