- The partnership will leverage DevsHealth’s DeepTech platform and IGTP’s extensive bacterial collection to discover new drugs against a major threat to public health.
Badalona/La Garriga, July 2nd, 2024. DevsHealth, a leading company in artificial intelligence (AI) driven drug discovery, and the Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute (IGTP), a public research centre in biomedical sciences, have announced a new partnership to develop new antibiotics for multi-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections.
Staphylococcus aureus is a common bacterium that can cause serious infections such as pneumonia, sepsis, endocarditis, and osteomyelitis. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it is one of the most important causes of deaths for nosocomial infections, accounting for more than 500,000 cases and 50,000 deaths per year in Europe and the United States. Moreover, it is a hight priority pathogen according to the WHO priority list of priority pathogens that pose the greatest threat to human health.
One of the main challenges in treating Staphylococcus aureus infections is the emergence and spread of methicillin-resistant strains (MRSA), which are resistant to most of the available antibiotics. Therefore, there is an urgent need to find new drugs that can overcome this resistance and effectively treat these infections.
The partnership between DevsHealth and IGTP aims to address this unmet medical need by combining their complementary expertise and resources. IGTP will provide DevsHealth with access to almost 400 bacterial strains, including their whole genome and antibiotic resistance profile. This will offer DevsHealth the opportunity to work with a massive data analysis to find new mechanisms of action that can avoid or overcome resistance. DevsHealth will use its DeepTech platform, which integrates AI, real-world data, and molecular modelling, to run an in silico drug discovery process in only a few days. The platform can generate novel molecules with optimal pharmacological and safety profiles, as well as predict their efficacy and toxicity.
DevsHealth and IGTP will work together for the discovery phase of the project, and, in the future, following its strategy for partnerships, DevsHealth, with the support of IGTP, will continue with the pre-clinical and clinical development of the selected candidates. The partnership fits with DevsHealth’s vision to industrialise drug development and build the largest pipeline on infectious diseases ever seen before. DevsHealth develops new molecules with an ultra-fast approach, making drug discovery and development something scalable and affordable.
“We are very excited to partner with IGTP, a renowned research centre with a strong expertise in infectious diseases and a valuable collection of bacterial strains. This collaboration will allow us to apply our DeepTech platform to a challenging and important problem, and to accelerate the discovery of new drugs against multi-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections. We believe that this partnership will bring us closer to our goal of delivering innovative and effective solutions for patients in need”, said Alfons Nonell-Canals, CEO at DevsHealth.
“We are pleased to collaborate with DevsHealth, a pioneering company in AI-driven drug discovery, and to contribute to their portfolio of infectious disease projects. We believe this partnership will leverage the synergy of our combined expertise and resources, facilitating the discovery of new treatments for a critical public health threat. We are confident that this collaboration will yield successful outcomes and pave the way for future joint initiatives,” said Noemí Párraga, researcher at the Clinical and Environmental Infectious Diseases Study Group (CEID) of the IGTP and leader of the project.
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