Transcript Prof. Jeff Errington, Director of the Centre for Bacterial Cell

The role of basic research in antibiotic
discovery and development
Prof Jeff Errington FMedSci FRS
Centre for Bacterial Cell Biology,
Newcastle University
and
Demuris Ltd
Who am I?
• Academic – >30 years basic science of bacterial
cells
– Relevant to antibiotic discovery – targets and assays
– Director of one of the worlds largest bacterial
research centres
• Two antibiotic spin out companies
– Prolysis (1998) – now part of Biota Pharmaceuticals
(NASDAQ)
– Demuris Ltd (2008) – antibiotics from natural products
Basic science leads to a major
funding gap
DISCOVERY (1-3 years; $5m)
Target Assay Screen
BASIC
SCIENCE
Hit
DEVELOPMENT (10 years; $500m)
Lead Candidate Trials Market
FUNDING GAP
“Valley of Death”
Research Councils, Charities, SMEs
~Phase 2
Pharma
Bottleneck in progression of Hits to
Candidates
COST
(per project)
Candidate Trials Market
Target Assay Screen
Hit
Lead
Solutions?
• Better choice of target and assay
• Better chemical starting points
• More funding of Hit to Candidate projects
Role of basic science
• Identify completely new strategies
– e.g. virulence targets, immune stimulants
• Enhance conventional strategies
– New ways to inhibit known targets
– Explore new conventional targets
• Improve methods for discovering new classes
of Natural Product compounds
– Game changing technologies around genomics
and synthetic biology
New opportunities around
Natural Product (NP) antibiotics
• Most existing antibiotics are derived from NPs
– Mainly actinomycete bacteria and fungi
• Huge diversity has not yet been fully explored
– Organismal diversity – new habitats, new isolation
methods, DNA trawling
– Genetic diversity – cryptic NP gene clusters
• Genome sequencing reveals all of the cryptic clusters
• Synthetic biology can generate antibiotic variants,
improved production capabilities, and wake up silent
gene clusters
• Improved analytical methods can enhance the
detection and purification of novel antibiotics