UK biotech receives over £8m to advance drug resistant antibiotics

Biotech company Oxford Drug Design has been awarded over £8 million to develop new antibiotics effective against drug-resistant superbugs.

Oxford Drug Design was awarded the funding by CARB-X, the UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), and an equity investment from 02h Ventures.

CARB-X (Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria Accelerator) awarded Oxford Drug Design over £5 million, while a smaller of grant of £2 million was awarded from DHSC through their Small Business Research Initiative funding stream.

The company will use the funds to develop new antibiotics effective against drug-resistant superbugs and to continue to develop its machine learning platform to tackle other pharmaceutical areas.

Oxford Drug Design CEO, Paul Finn, said: “To win these two highly competitive awards is a remarkable success and a tremendous validation of the strength of our science and its potential to deliver a new antibiotic to treat drug resistant bacterial infections. The funding provided by DHSC and CARB-X will significantly accelerate the development of our series of aminoacyl tRNA synthetase inhibitors. We are also delighted to be supported by o2h Ventures, who have been instrumental to the success of the equity funding round. Multiple compound series have been identified with the aid of our innovative cheminformatics and machine learning technologies. These compounds represent new classes of antibiotics with activity against Gram-negative organisms, an area of critical unmet medical need for which the clinical development pipeline is very limited.”