Spread awareness to stop resistance: Lygature supports World Antimicrobial Awareness Week

Antimicrobials are the backbone of modern medicine, allowing us to effectively treat infections. However, the overuse and misuse of antimicrobials are driving drug resistant pathogens, leading to an increasingly urgent global health crisis.

COVID-19 has demonstrated the world’s lack of preparedness for major pandemics and has highlighted how important it is to follow the health guidance of organizations like the WHO. If we are to prevent an outbreak of multiple or totally resistant bacteria, we need to spread awareness to stop resistance. As Dr Adhanom Ghebreyesus says, “it’s our shared responsibility to keep the drugs we have working for everyone, everywhere.”  

Lygature’s ongoing efforts to support this cause

Lygature is involved in two projects in the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) space: GNA NOW and UNITE4TB. Established in 2019, GNA NOW is focused on Gram-Negative bacteria – widely regarded as the main culprit representing the gravest danger for patients. It is a European collaboration bringing together key experts in antibiotic discovery and development, with a commitment to developing completely novel compounds derived from previously unknown natural compounds. Ultimately, the goal of GNA NOW is to progress new classes of Gram-Negative antibiotics from lead optimization to the completion of Phase I clinical trials.

Dr Kristina Orrling, Global Health Lead at Lygature in charge of coordinating the GNA NOW Consortium says: “Any acceleration that can be offered in terms of raising awareness of AMR, and producing better drugs and treatments for patients, will prove very important for saving lives. The field is still quite dispersed, so we need to bring more people together. This is where Lygature can make a real difference. By establishing the right connections and collaborations, we can achieve better health outcomes faster, bringing health innovations to the most vulnerable on earth.”

Launched this year, UNITE4TB is a public-private partnership involving 30 partners from 13 countries. With a budget of €185 million and a project term of seven years, UNITE4TB aims to deliver novel phase 2 clinical trials that will accelerate the development of new tuberculosis (TB) drugs and regimens. Achieving this goal will facilitate fulfilment of one of the main unmet needs in the TB field: better-tolerated drug regimens of shorter duration that can be deployed to tackle TB across various drug-resistance patterns and co-morbidities.

Lygature supports UNITE4TB with over-all Consortium management. Commenting on the TB/AMR challenge and the UNITE4TB partnership, Dr Remco de Vrueh, Lygature Global Health Lead says: “Over the last few decades, the public health challenge of multi drug resistant TB – the largest concern in the containment of AMR globally – has triggered renewed scientific efforts in anti-TB drug research and development. By setting a new standard for TB regimen development, UNITE4TB represents a unique opportunity to shift the current paradigm of clinical TB drug development. Lygature is proud to act as the independent facilitator of the consortium, adding to our mission of forging partnerships that make an impactful contribution to global health challenges.”

Both GNA NOW and UNITE4TB are funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) and fall under the IMI AMR Accelerator. Another IMI-funded and Lygature-coordinated project, the European Lead Factory (ELF), is also contributing to tackling the AMR problem.

Worldwide, researchers are looking for drugs that can slow down or even reverse resistance emergence. In the search for new antibiotics, they look to identify new biological molecular structures and signalling pathways that might be targeted by future drugs. However, a hurdle is often reached as researchers don’t always have the possibilities and resources to translate these new antimicrobial targets to compounds that can be further developed into new drugs.

The ELF bridges this so-called ‘innovation gap’. By giving researchers from academia and SMEs access to a unique compound library and state-of-the-art screening facilities, the ELF accelerates drug development research. A large portion of the ELF portfolio is focused on infectious diseases and several are specifically aimed at identifying compounds against bacterial infections. With the help of the results and hit compounds delivered by the ELF, an interesting AMR-related assay has even been put forward for clinical studies by a team at the University of Oxford.

“Developments like this demonstrate that public-private partnerships like the European Lead Factory can make a real difference and deliver results in key research areas such as AMR. The European Lead Factory is an important example of the Lygature mission to bring academia, industry and society together in collaborative projects that allow participants to benefit from shared resources,” says Dr Jon de Vlieger, Director of Business Development at Lygature and coordinator of the ELF program.

Useful links:

• For more information on the GNA NOW Consortium, visit the IMI AMR Accelerator website and sign up for the AMR Accelerator newsletter
• Read an interview with GNA NOW Project Lead, Eric Bacqué of Evotec
• Take a look at the launch press release for UNITE4TB and read about a new publication from the Consortium
• Check out the latest edition of the ELF Newsletter and read a recent interview with the ELF Programme Clearance Team, the team responsible for the selection of the best hit compounds for each ELF screening programme
• Read an interview with Lygature Global Health portfolio Leads Dr Kristina Orrling and Dr Remco de Vrueh