Argenta and ANTABIO Announce Drug Discovery Collaboration
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Argenta has announced that it has signed a collaboration agreement with ANTABIO.
Under the terms of the agreement, Argenta will provide medicinal chemistry, computer-aided drug design and ADME/PK services, together with its integrated drug discovery expertise, to assist ANTABIO in the identification of novel anti-bacterial agents and discovery of a development candidate that can be progressed into clinical trials.
The collaboration is funded by a Wellcome Trust Seeding Drug Discovery award.
Between 5 and 10% of hospital patients in the US and Europe develop hospital-acquired (nosocomial) infections. The consequences are up to 75,000 deaths per year, 2.5 million additional hospital days due to drug-resistant bacterial infections and an average additional cost of 1.5 billion euros for healthcare systems.
In 2004, the World Health Organization identified infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria as the number one disease requiring priority medicines.
ANTABIO’s first-in-class, small molecule compounds offer a synergistic solution to the shortfall of current antibacterial agents.
In particular, ANTABIO is developing new drugs that will work with existing antibiotics to enable them to regain their activity against multi- or pan-drug resistant Gram-negative pathogens such as NDM-1 bacteria.
ANTABIO’s compounds will also prevent infections caused by virulent and multi-drug resistant bacteria such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) that are responsible for severe nosocomial-acquired infections as well as other common community-acquired conditions like urinary tract infections and food poisoning.
Dr John Montana, Managing Director of Argenta, commented, “Argenta is proud to announce this agreement with ANTABIO, which is the second SDDI-funded collaboration to be disclosed by Argenta in recent months. There is an urgent need for new anti-bacterial drugs and we look forward to working with ANTABIO to progress their compounds rapidly towards pre-clinical candidate nomination”.
“We are very excited to collaborate with Argenta on this SDDI-funded programme” said Dr Marc Lemonnier, CEO of ANTABIO.
Dr Lemonnier continued, “Assembling an expert and complementary drug discovery team is critical when it comes to advancing novel drugs that are so badly needed by patients suffering from life-threatening infections. This joint effort nicely exemplifies our vision of high-value partnering as a key element to deliver tomorrow’s antibacterial agents”.
