Discuva, the antibiotics drug discovery and development company, has announced that its collaboration with Roche, originally initiated in February 2014, has been extended to February 2018 under a new contract amendment.
The collaboration is focused on the discovery and development of new antibiotics to treat life-threatening infections caused by multidrug resistant Gram-negative bacteria using Discuva’s proprietary SATIN technology platform.
To date, the collaboration has resulted in multiple lead programmes that target Gram-negative pathogenic bacteria currently causing challenging antibiotic-resistant infections.
The candidate antibiotics were identified from a phenotypic screening process and triaged using Discuva’s proprietary SATIN technology to identify compounds with the optimal profile to progress successfully to the next stage of development.
The collaboration extension allows the combined Roche/Discuva team to continue exploring these compounds in order to expedite the development of these novel antibiotic chemotypes towards essential medicines.
About antibiotic resistance
Antibacterial resistance represents a major threat to public health worldwide. The problem is getting worse due to the lack of new effective treatments being authorized recently, which may lead to infections becoming more difficult to treat.
In addition, many more people die of complications caused by secondary infection with antibiotic-resistant bacteria because the side effects of the treatment for their primary condition reduces the patient’s defence to bacteria, leaving them vulnerable to an increasing range of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
In the USA, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that more than two million patients are affected by drug-resistant infections each year, with direct healthcare costs as high as $20 billion and with additional costs to society for lost productivity potentially doubling these figures. At least 23,000 die as a direct result of antibiotic resistance in these increasingly dangerous infectious agents.
In a report published jointly by the European Medicines Agency, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the international network ReAct – Action on Antibiotic Resistance, at least 25,000 patients in the EU die each year from infections due to bacteria that are resistant to many medicines, and infections due to these bacteria in the EU result in additional healthcare costs and productivity losses of at least €1.5 billion each year.
