The French Government Defence procurement agency invests €900,000 towards Pherecydes Pharma managed €1.2-million project, involving several university and military laboratories.
Pherecydes Pharma is attending the Forum coorganised by PHAG ESPOIRS and LE LIEN associations, as well as their partners, Narbonne Hospital and City, on January 25, 2012 in Narbonne - France, at 9h15, in Le Théatre.
Biotech Finance press details the purpose of this investiment targeting the set up of a phage bioproduction unit and testing of 2 therapeutic products in human clinical trials.
Meeting the Belgian biotech companies at the 2011 Forum Bio-Entrepreneurs held in the Bourse de Commerce de Paris, December 6, 2011.
Applications
Therapeutic domains
Within antibiotic resistant infections, the most important unmet needs lies in the development of effective drugs against resistant gram-negative pathogens:
- Escherichia coli with 25 % of bacterial human infections
- Pseudomonas aeruginosa with 10 % of the cases.
Furthermore, a gram-positive germ such as Staphylococcus aureus occurs, as well, in 19 % of all bacterial infections. Together, the 3 species exceed 50 % of the market.
Skin infections, such as in wounds: burn, diabetic foot, venous ulcer…; pulmonary: intensive care unit mechanical ventilation; or deep bone nosocomial infections are three segments where antibiotic resistant strains are of a particular concern. They are the core of our pipeline activity.
Diagnostic
Today, antibiotic therapy is still based mostly on treatments applied without knowing the cause of the infection.
This approach:
- results in a failure rate of 60% of the treatments
- leads to the selection of bacterial species difficult to control, ex. Clostridium difficile
- promotes the proliferation of germs that evolve resistance to antibiotics.
To avoid repeating such mistakes, an anti-infective treatment must now prove its effectiveness before use. For this reason, Pherecydes Pharma wishes to support its therapy product line with companion diagnostic tests, which assess the effectiveness of a cocktail of phages before treatment. This is a shift from wide spread antibiotherapy to a form of personalized medicine.
The diagnostic test will help assessing the sensitivity of the pathogene patient strain to the phages of a cocktail before treatment, through a rapid (results in less than 8 hours) and simple test, which helps ensuring treatment efficacy: a development that goes along with the treatment product, since the reagents (bacteriophages) are the same.
Protein optimization
TAPE technology allows to optimize all types of proteins, including the proteins involved in the host recognition from the bacterial phage.
Among the categories of valuable proteins, the optimization of monoclonal antibodies for therapeutic treatment or purification industry is a recent development of Pherecydes Pharma. Validated with an industrial partner of the European sector, the collaboration has demonstrated the value of our technology for other fields of application.
Nanotechnology
Through our total control of T4 phage recombination and replication process, we can engineer phages to make them suitable for a variety of nanoapplications. For instance:
- As delivery vehicles for protein and DNA vaccines and gene therapy vectors,
- As nanodevices to be used in electronics,
- As nanowires with applications in microcircuits.
Imagination is the only limiting factor. Please contact us for a further evaluation of our technology, according to your needs.