Helperby Therapeutics Discovers Resistance Breakers - AMajor Breakthrough in the Fight against Antibiotic Resistance
(PRWEB) November 18, 2013 -- This week the world’s biggest disease control agencies will come together in the annual global campaign to promote antibiotic awareness against the backdrop of the World Health Organisation’s stark warning that a post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it.
With this sobering thought, it is heartening to see small British drug discovery organisation, Helperby Therapeutics, announce the discovery of its patented antibiotic resistance compounds which could breathe new life into our increasingly obsolete armoury of antibiotics.
Speaking as it signed its first major development license with Asian pharmaceuticals giant, Cadila Pharmaceuticals, Chief Scientific Officer and Helperby’s creator Professor Anthony Coates said that a future without antibiotics is unthinkable but could happen: “Imagine a time when a cut finger could leave you fighting for your life. The emergence and spread of drug-resistant pathogens has accelerated whilst the pipeline for new antibiotic drugs has all but run dry - this exciting and timely discovery and collaboration with Cadila offers us all hope.”
Helperby, a spin out of St George’s University of London, has been working on antibiotic resistance for the past decade, to find ways to make the existing 20 classes of antibiotics more effective against growing resistance. Its researchers, led by Professor Coates and Dr Yanmin Hu, discovered a way to boost the antibacterial effect of traditional antibiotics.
Helperby’s lead compound, HT61, which demonstrated promising results in early clinical trials against one of the more common pathogens, Staphylococcus Aureus, has now been licensed to Cadila. Helperby will supply Antibiotic Resistance Breakers whilst Cadila will develop the combinations with old antibiotics. The deal value was undisclosed but a global shared license agreement is now in place.
Cadila, the first Indian pharmaceutical organisation to receive authorisation from the US Food and Drug Administration, will take the combined compound and antibiotics through further clinical trials, approvals and into commercialisation with the aim to have the first treatment commercially available in less than two years.
The discovery, combined with the licensing agreement is both innovative and timely; particularly when compared against the usual 10-18 years that drugs usually take to come to market at costs of £50m-£1bn. Drug discovery is a high risk business and many fail during the clinical trial and approval process, with a corresponding decreasing lack of appetite among the industry to pursue the development of new antibiotics.
“For the last 50 years mankind has treated antibiotics as a cheap raw material that can be used indiscriminately for many things, including animal feed, but the supply is rapidly disappearing,” said Professor Coates. “Last year many people returned from holiday in countries where resistance has reached epidemic proportions, with untreatable infections. As a consequence time has run out to develop new ones – mankind needs 200 antibiotics, the best option left is to revive the old ones.”
Helperby has seven other antibiotic resistance breaker programmes, with a further 300 molecules under investigation, but is now actively seeking international partners to take these promising programmes through development.
For further information please contact:
USA: Luke Giroux: +1 860-280-1302 or luke(at)lrgiroux(dot)com
Europe: Pat McLaren +44 7703656192 or pat(dot)mclaren(at)codexglobal(dot)net
Pat McLaren, Codex Global, http://www.codexglobal.net, +44 7703656192, [email protected]
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