Genetics to new chemical entities

对现代药物和作物保护化学品不敏感的细菌、真菌和植物的抗药性菌株对社会构成严重威胁。抗生素抗药性超级细菌、抗药性癌症和抗药性作物害虫的增加都可能对我们的健康、生活质量以及我们所知的最终生活的可持续性产生重大影响。为了应对这一日益增长的威胁，我们需要新的化合物，能够选择性地杀死这些耐药生物，并作为未来的药物和作物保护化学品。识别具有良好生物活性的新化合物是很困难的。通常情况下，公司需要筛选10万种化合物才能找到一种与预期目标匹配的结构。这种低的“命中率”使得新药和作物保护化学品的发现变得缓慢而昂贵。我们已经开发了一个平台，使我们能够通过改造土壤细菌来生产新的具有生物活性的天然产品化合物，这些化合物的命中率是目前工业使用的合成化学品的20倍。通过我们的市场研究，我们已经确定了制药和农用化学品行业的几家公司，他们热衷于与我们合作，发现新的天然产品，这些产品可以开发成新药和作物保护化合物。我们将利用这笔资金更好地开发我们的平台，并证明我们可以快速且负担得起地构建新的复合库。我们将通过用机器人使平台自动化来实现这一点，这将使我们能够并行设计更多的细菌，并减少平台完成发现周期所需的时间。随着我们开发平台，我们将产生新的天然产品库，使我们能够与我们技术的早期采用者合作。我们的目标是将这些早期采用者伙伴关系发展为更深层次的长期共同开发项目，重点是将新药和作物保护产品推向市场。

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.