Genetics to new chemical entities

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Resistant strains of bacteria, fungi and plants that are not susceptible to modern medicine and crop protection chemicals, pose a serious threat to society. The rise in antibiotic resistant superbugs, drug-resistant cancers and treatment-resistant crop pests are all threatening to have a major impact on our health, quality of life and ultimately the sustainability of life as we know it. To combat this growing threat we need new chemical compounds that are able to selectively kill these resistant organisms and act as the medicines and crop protection chemicals of the future. Identifying new compounds that have good bioactivities is hard. Typically companies need to screen 100,000 compounds to find one structure that hits a desired target. This low "hit rate" makes discovering new medicines and crop protection chemicals slow and expensive. We have developed a platform which enables us to engineer soil bacteria to produce new bioactive natural product compounds that have hit-rates 20x-better than synthetic chemicals currently being used by industry. Through our market research we have identified several companies in both the pharmaceutical and agrochemical sectors who are keen to partner with us to discover new natural products that could be developed into new medicines and crop protection compounds. We will use this funding to better develop our platform and to demonstrate that we can build new compound libraries quickly and affordably. We will achieve this by automating the platform with robotics, which will allow us to engineer more bacteria in parallel and decrease the time the platform takes to complete a discovery cycle. As we develop the platform we will generate new libraries of natural products that will enable us to partner with early adopters of our technology. Our aim is to grow these early adopter partnerships into deeper, long term co-development projects with a focus on bringing new medicines and crop protection products to market.