LABORATORY INFORMATICS


“This widespread antibiotic use encourages resistance to develop; the alternative of treating pigs with an antibiotic that is specific for their infection is likely to be safer for both pigs and humans”


from a dedicated fund set up by the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care for collaborations with China. It was awarded to a consortium that includes the University of Portsmouth and two Chinese partners, which is using the firm’s algorithms to search for small molecules, including components of traditional Chinese medicines, that might be effective against the bacterium Streptococcus suis, which infects pigs. ‘Pork production is a huge industry in China. Pigs there are often given broad-spectrum antibiotics, both as prophylactics against infection and as


growth promoters,’ explains Finn. ‘This widespread antibiotic use encourages resistance to develop; the alternative of treating pigs with an antibiotic that is specific for their infection is likely to be safer for both pigs and humans.’ This use of a design pathway that has


matured in response to the need to tackle human infections to develop a veterinary medicine is an innovative response to a further ‘ambition for change’: protecting animal health and welfare. Separately, the company has hired a PhD student trained in image analysis for topological mapping and security applications to further enhance their proprietary 3D shape recognition algorithms. Forge Therapeutics, based in San


Diego, California, is also accelerating its development programmes, using its proprietary, fragment-based Blacksmith technology to model inhibitors that bind to bacterial metal-binding enzymes as candidate drugs. ‘We have worked in collaboration with bio-inorganic chemists and medicinal chemists to grow and improve our specialist fragment library’, says Forge’s COO, David Puerta. The firm has also optimised its


modelling pipeline and aims to take a lead molecule into clinical development for severe urinary tract infections in 2020; a second programme targeting severe lung infections with Pseudomonas bacteria has reached the lead optimisation stage.


Investing in innovation The success of companies like Forge and Oxford Drug Design in early-stage antibiotic discovery indicates that there is no shortage of innovation in this sector. There are, in fact, significantly more antibacterial compounds being developed than there were a few years ago, largely thanks to increasing investment in the industry by public bodies, research charities and philanthropists. The largest such investor is probably the global not-for-profit accelerator Carb-X, which has so far made more than 50 awards to companies working on early-stage antibiotic development to the tune of about $150m; Forge is one of only a few companies to have received two such grants. ‘With the current economic state of antibiotic development, ‘push’ mechanisms for new antibiotic programmes, such as Carb-X, aren’t nice-


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December 2019/January 2020 Scientific Computing World 17


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