AgileBiotics

According to the latest reports of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) we are entering the post antibiotic era, due to insufficient discovery and development of new antibiotics. The continuous emergence of bacterial resistance against existing antibiotics is life threatening to society. Without acceleration of antibiotic development, death rate will increase by 10-fold by 2050, reaching 250,000 in Europe and 10 million deaths worldwide.  The society is running out of treatment options especially against multidrug resistant (MDR) bacteria, which belong to the alarming ESKAPE panel: Enterococcus faecium(+), Staphylococcus aureus(+), Klebsiella pneunomiae(-), Acinetobacter baumannii(-), Pseudomonas aeruginosa(-), Enterobacteriaceae spp.(-). Unfortunately, antibiotic development takes still 10 to 15 years, and most new antibiotic candidates fail in clinical trials due to toxicity and safety reasons. Reviving an existing class of antibiotics is still the most efficient and promising strategy to bring novel antibiotics to the market. This approach evades the discovery stage and increases significantly the success rate during clinical trials. And this is where AGILeBiotics steps in: Our technology OxaSelect accelerates the optimization of existing antibiotics, which are based on structurally complex natural products. We employ antibiotics, that lost their efficacy due to bacterial resistance, to develop novel antibiotics against life-threatening infections caused by MDR bacteria.