Print“ENABLE, part of the initiative’s New Drugs for Bad Bugs program, builds on a series of projects to target the bottlenecks in the development and effective use of novel antibiotics.”
European universities, institutes, and companies backed by $117 million (€85 million) from the Innovative Medicines Initiative are collaborating to establish a new anti-bacterial drug discovery platform.
The 32 partners, spanning 13 countries, will work to address the world's growing epidemic of antibiotic resistance by discovering promising new antibiotics and moving at least one through an early-stage clinical trial by 2019.
Just two new classes of antibiotics have been brought to the market in the last 30 years, but many more are needed. Each year, antimicrobial resistance throughout the European Union causes more than 25,000 deaths and costs the European economy more than $2 billion (€1.5 billion), according to the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a research partnership formed in May 2012 between the European Commission and major pharmaceutical companies.
GlaxoSmithKline and Sweden’s Uppsala University will lead the European Gram-Negative Antibacterial Engine, or ENABLE, project. Over six years they'll work to develop novel antibiotics against Gram-negative pathogens with financial support from the Innovative Medicines Initiative. Gram-negative bacteria, such as E. coli, have effective barriers against drugs, making treatment difficult, resistance likely, and drug development costs and risks high.
ENABLE, part of the initiative’s New Drugs for Bad Bugs program, builds on a series of projects to target the bottlenecks in the development and effective use of novel antibiotics.
Scientists at the John Innes Centre in Norwich will evaluate the relative potency of new compounds and determine the molecular basis for their antibiotic action, work that will enable development of the antibiotics of the future.
While discovering new antibiotics is important, ENABLE’s organizers warn that any new antibiotics brought to market will need be used cautiously, to delay the development of resistance and avoid the problems created by over-reliance on currently marketed antibiotics.
February 16, 2014
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-partners_to_leverage_117m_for_antibiotic_discovery.html
