Project description
Low-cost antibiotic to address antibiotic resistance
The rise of antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative bacteria, particularly against last-resort polymyxins, poses a significant threat to society. This resistance could lead to higher healthcare costs and put patients at risk of life-threatening infections. The ERC-funded PREVAIL project will validate the effectiveness of a new antibiotic, Laterocidamide (LATERO), in addressing global antibiotic resistance. This synthetic antibiotic has the potential to combat Gram-negative bacterial infections, including multi-drug-resistant strains, and offers low production costs. The project will conduct in vitro and in vivo studies to assess LATERO’s efficacy and safety, as well as evaluate its commercial feasibility for market entry and securing funding opportunities.
Objective
The emergence of Gram-negative bacterial resistance against antibiotics, especially the last-line-of-defense polymyxins, presents a societal threat with the potential to inflict higher healthcare costs and life-threatening patient risks. For decades, physicians have relied on polymyxins as a last line of defense to treat resistant Gram-negative bacterial infections that do not respond to standard antibiotic therapies. However, in 2016, a new polymyxin resistance mechanism surfaced: mobilized colistin resistance (MCR-1). The global overuse of antibiotics, including polymyxins, and a persistent lack of novel antibiotics have made us vulnerable to increased bacterial resistance, including the MCR-1 strains, seriously threatening our public health.
In Project PREVAIL, our group will validate the effectiveness of a novel drug, Laterocidamide (LATERO), from a new class of antibiotics to deliver an innovative solution that can mitigate the alarming global surge of antibiotic resistance. Our novel synthetic antibiotic, LATERO, has best-in-class potential to address these challenges with (i) minimal antimicrobial resistance, (ii) Gram-negative bacterial efficacy against polymyxin-resistant strains, and (iii) the ability to be produced at low cost. Moreover, our robust synthetic approach will allow us to generate additional analogs in the future.
In PREVAIL, we will explore LATERO's technical and commercial potential. Specifically, we will validate LATERO as a novel antibiotic for (multi-drug-resistant) Gram-negative bacterial infections by performing in vitro and in vivo efficacy and preclinical toxicity studies. In parallel, we will: 1. Analyze the IP position and develop an IP rights strategy to protect LATERO and new analogs developed in the project to secure future assets. 2. Evaluate LATERO’s commercial feasibility and construct viable business cases to enter the market to support outreach and procuring future funding opportunities.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC-POC - HORIZON ERC Proof of Concept GrantsHost institution
2311 EZ Leiden
Netherlands