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Mission & Impact
Why does it matter?
The Problem: Priority pathogens
The World Health Organisation (WHO) regularly updates its list of priority pathogens that present the greatest treatment challenges when they become untreatable with current antibiotics.
These germs thrive in places like hospitals, where they are constantly exposed to antibiotics and learn how to survive them. Resistance genes are inherited from mother cells by daughter cells, and also through inter-species transfer via DNA plasmids.
This means that they pass resistance traits down to their offspring and can even swap ‘instruction manuals’ (DNA) with entirely different types of bacteria.
Bacteria can produce a new generation (daughters) 500,000 times faster than humans can. When you have billions of bacteria in a single infection multiplying at that speed, the chances of them developing a ‘spontaneous mutation’, a mutation that makes them immune to antibiotics, are incredibly high.
Because these germs are evolving so much faster than we are, they have become the primary target of our most urgent medical research.
We are in a literal race against the clock to develop new treatments before these ‘superbugs’ outpace us entirely.
For these reasons, not surprisingly, priority pathogens are the focus of urgent drug development efforts.
Our solution
Even though there are over 100 different types of antibiotics currently in use worldwide, they are all actually just variations of the same seven original ‘families’ found in nature.
Because these families have been around for so long, bacteria have had decades to develop clever ways to survive every single one.
MetalloBio is changing the game.
Instead of tweaking the same existing chemistry, our treatments are built on an inorganic platform. This gives them a radically different physical structure and a completely new blueprint that bacteria have never seen before.
Because our compounds use entirely new ‘modes of action’ (new ways of attacking and killing germs), they are incredibly powerful against a wide range of infectious pathogens.
Most importantly, because the attack is so different and so fast, bacteria struggle to develop the genetic ‘armour’ needed to become resistant.
Our research isn’t just improving the toolkit, we are introducing an entirely new one to the fight against AMR.