With the company’s award-winning TRIC technology (Transcriptional Regulator Inhibitory Compounds) BioVersys is able to restore the efficacy of established antibiotics or directly target drug-resistant pathogens. By this, BioVersys addresses the high medical need for new treatments against life-threatening bacterial infections that has emerged in recent years due to the resistance of bacterial strains against existing antibiotics.
BioVersys has a pipeline of promising compounds that addresses this concern. Our most advanced R&D programs are in preclinical development for nosocomial infections (hospital infections), and Tuberculosis. In 2020 BioVersys plans to launch its first Phase I clinical trials.
Bacterial strains that are problematic in the clinic often have developed resistance mechanisms towards multiple antibiotics, allowing them to escape therapeutic intervention. Such strains cannot be manipulated with standard laboratory tools, because they can withstand selection pressures that are used to select genome modifications. As a consequence, research is often performed on non-pathogenic strains which behave differently and therefore, the data obtained cannot be correlated with problematic strains.
At BioVersys we have developed an antibiotic-free genome engineering platform that allows us to genetically engineer strains independent of their antibiotic resistance profile. This technology has proven to be very efficient and useful for the identification and validation of novel drug targets, for example in Acinetobacter baumannii.
Within the Eurostars IMPACT2AMR consortium BioVersys aims to extend its proprietary genome engineering platform with different genetic tools that will allow us to target other high-priority nosocomial pathogens, such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Escherichia coli or Klebsiella pneumoniae.
By using this technology, clinically relevant strains will be bioluminescent labelled and used by the other consortium partners, BioSystems Technology and Voxcan, to establish different infection models. These models ultimately allow us to follow bacterial infection progression and treatment in real-time and may significantly reduce the amount of animals used in the drug development process.
