Novel antifungal discovery from mining unexplored microbes

Over 150Mn people are affected by severe fungal diseases each year with 1.7Mn deaths globally. The most severe infections include invasive aspergillosis (IA): a major healthcare-associated infection with mortality rates of up to 95%.

Current therapeutic options for IA are limited to three drug classes with low efficacy, severe adverse effects, and high treatment burden. The treatment cycle for these infections costs £90K in average healthcare spend. With no new antifungals classes entering the market in the last 20 years, there is an urgent need for new antifungal treatment options to combat aspergillosis infections and a major market opportunity to develop new solutions against fungal infections more broadly.

Two-thirds of the classes of antifungals used in the clinic derive from the ~1% of microbes that can be readily cultured in the laboratory. This bioresource has now been exhausted for novel antifungals and efforts to discover new synthetic solutions have failed to fill the gap. Accessing the remaining 99% of uncultured microbes represents the best opportunity to discover new antifungals.

Bactobio has developed a platform combining synthetic biology, next-generation sequencing, and machine learning to culture previously unculturable microbes. So far, we have gained exclusive access to ?1,500 novel and unexplored microbial species. In this project, we will expand and screen our in-house library of unique microbial species for the production of novel antifungals against _A. fumigatus_. We have set an ambitious goal to find 2-5 promising antifungal candidates targeting _A.fumigatus_, providing a compelling case for further investment from the pharmaceutical industry through licensing deals with an initial asset value of £12Mn per compound.