Supported by the Versneller Innovatieve Ambities (VIA)-subsidy from Samenwerking Noord-Nederland (SNN), AGILeBiotics is developing novel antibiotics for hospital-treated Gram-negative infections. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) the world is entering the post-antibiotic era, with no therapy option left for patients infected by multidrug-resistant (MDR) pathogen.

Without novel antibiotics, death rate will increase 10-fold by 2050, reaching 250,000 deaths in Europe and 10 million deaths worldwide. Reviving an existing class of antibiotics is still the most successful strategy to accelerate antibiotic development and increases the chance for approval of novel antibiotics by regulatory bodies. This approach evades the discovery stage and increases the success rate during clinical trials. Supported by the VIA-subsidy form SNN, AGILeBiotics is reviving an existing class of antibiotics, which is based on natural product. Natural products have often a structurally complex molecular structure and therefore introducing structural changes in order to overcome resistance and reduce toxicity is prohibitive expensive and time consuming. Therefore, application of complex natural products in the development of the ‘next generation’ antibiotic is rarely happening in industry. This is where our company AGILeBiotics offers a solution. Our proprietary technology ModiDirect simplifies structural modification of existing natural product-based antibiotics giving quick access to the ‘next generation’ antibiotics. ModiDirect is a scalable chemical reaction, which accelerates our in-house antibiotics development against the most life-threatening multidrug-resistant bacteria. In our running project supported by SNN we are generating a library of novel antibiotic candidates with the aim to identify a drug candidate, which overcomes multiple resistance mechanisms and owns broad-spectrum activity against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria.