Omnicin Therapeutics, an early stage pharmaceutical company, is developing small peptide drugs that act as potentiators of existing antibiotics to treat infections caused by multi-resistant Gram-negative bacteria. This technology provides new treatment strategies without introducing new antibiotics.
In addition to antiviral therapies and vaccines, there will be a growing need for new therapeutic options for bacterial infections. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is the ability of a microorganism (like bacteria, viruses, and some parasites) to stop an antimicrobial (such as antibiotics, antivirals and antimalarials) from working against it. As a result, standard treatments become ineffective, infections persist and may spread to others. The worldwide percentage of bacteria that are resistant to one or more antibiotics is rising. On a yearly basis it has been estimated that 700.000 deaths are caused by antimicrobial resistance (AMR review 2016).The top 3 of resistant bacteria from the WHO priority pathogen list 2017, belong to the group of Gram-negative pathogens, indicating that sufficient treatment strategies and effective antibiotics against Gram-negative bacteria are lacking.
Gram-negative bacteria have an additional outer-membrane that Gram-positive bacteria lack. This outer membrane is composed of glycolipids, lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and it is responsible for the low penetrability and high resistance to some antibiotics. In the search for new tools to combat multidrug resistant bacteria, the University of Groningen discovered and patented synthetic peptides that display strong synergy with clinically used antibiotics. These peptides act as LPS binders and as gate openers that allow antibiotics to pass the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria. The synthetic peptides thus enable the treatment of Gram-negative pathogens using antibiotics that are normally only used for Gram-positive infections.
OTX001, Omnicin’s lead candidate peptide drug, has shown to increase the antibiotic effectivity of vancomycin and rifampicin 1.000 – 10.000 times for several Gram-negative bacteria. This effect was demonstrated in relevant in-vitro assays, with several strains of resistant bacteria and in relevant in-vivo mouse infection models and in PK and early toxicity studies. It is likely that OTX001 will be selected as the clinical candidate for further clinical development.
