Projects Profile
Project Title
Development of novel antibiotic compounds with potential in therapy, cosmetics and wound healing
Partnership
Prof. Robert C Hider, King’s College London
Prof. Yongping Yu, Zhejiang University
Project Aim
In this project research scientists at King’s and at Zhejiang Universities are establishing a research partnership to develop novel antimicrobial chemical entities for medical or cosmetic applications.
This project aims to draw on the research expertise at King’s on the novel antimicrobial system and at Zhejiang on pharmaceutical development to further evaluate the novel antimicrobial mechanism and transform it into new generation drug candidates for further commercial development and exploration.
Inspiration for the projects
Bacterial and fungal resistance to antimicrobial agents is a growing problem worldwide. Many of the recent developments by the pharmaceutical industry have been directed against resistant strains of Gram-positive pathogens, whereas there is very little in development to address the growing unmet medical need of multi-drug resistant Gram-negative infections for instance Pseudomonas aeroginosa and Klebsiella pneumoniae
At King’s College London, over the past ten years a set of novel compounds have been developed, which have been successfully demonstrated to be able to inhibit, based on a novel mechanism, the growth of both gram negative (Klebsiella pneumoniae) and gram positive (Staphylococcus aureus) organisms. S. aureus is the multidrug resistant organism associated with MRSA
With complementary strength of pharmaceutical expertise in Zhejiang University, and King’s College London in pharmaceutical sciences and ion chelating reagents, King’s and Zhejiang team is carrying out a joint research project to further explore and develop new drug compounds and formulate them in a wide range of systems useful to the medical and cosmetic industry.
Commercial Potential and Further Development
The key deliverables for this partnership project include a) to further evaluate novel bacteria inhibition mechanism and construct suitable novel compounds; (b) to strengthen the research partnership and establish a joint team with complimentary skill sets key to the research work; c) to fully evaluate the technology feasibility and assess the full market potential in order to carry out further commercial development of the technology.
The project could potentially open up new opportunities for new generation antimicrobial agents to be developed and allow the unmet demand for bacterial and fungal resistance to antimicrobial agents in medical and cosmetic industries. The project has attracted strong industry interests which will be followed up when the project reached final stage of the development.
