Oxford Drug Design has been awarded £1m in funding to progress its uUTI (uncomplicated urinary tract infection) antibacterial programme, as announced by PACE (Pathways to Antimicrobial Clinical Efficacy).
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PACE will support novel antimicrobial projects over the next three years, with Oxford Drug Design set to receive £1m to accelerate the optimisation of its novel therapeutic against uUTIs.
In the UK, there were over 1.8 million hospital admissions involving UTIs between 2018-19 and 2022-23, with the condition being responsible for around 236,000 deaths in 2019. UTIs are also the most common outpatient infections in the United States, with between 50% and 60% of adult women experiencing at least one UTI in their lifetime. If untreated, UTIs can lead to a form of sepsis called urosepsis, which kills between 20% and 40% of those who contract it.
Oxford Drug Design is a biotechnology company using pioneering AI computational methods to discover and develop novel therapeutics across a range of challenging diseases with high unmet medical need. This funding will allow the pre-clinical drug discovery company to build on a substantial body of earlier work that has already identified potent antibacterial compounds.
The current project, funded by PACE, will identify improved candidates that accumulate in the bladder to treat the infection locally, while also enabling Oxford Drug Design to generate the safety and efficacy data that is needed for entry into clinical trials.
The uUTI programme will progress Oxford Drug Design’s work on the novel target leucyl-tRNA synthetase, belonging to the tRNA synthetase enzyme family on which Oxford Drug Design has developed a deep understanding.
The highly innovative lead candidates are part of the company’s extensive portfolio of proprietary chemical scaffolds which have shown broad activity against the enzyme class in both the company’s primary oncology area and in infections.
PACE is one of the UK’s largest public-private initiatives targeting early-stage antimicrobial medicines and diagnostic discovery. It was founded in 2023 by LifeArc, Medicines Discovery Catapult and Innovate UK with a £30 million programme of funding and support to be deployed over five years. PACE will provide additional access to organisations with capabilities that can help advance these projects.
Dr Paul Finn, CSO of Oxford Drug Design, said: "There is a very large unmet medical need within uUTI care, and applying our integrated computational and tRNA synthetase technologies we have already created an antibiotic which is undergoing optimisation in the laboratory. The PACE funding provides significant resources to our uUTI programme and we are excited to be working closely with them to bring a much-needed new antibiotic closer to clinical use."
Dr Beverley Isherwood, PACE programme director, said: "We are pleased to welcome Oxford Drug Design to our project portfolio and congratulate them on their success in a highly competitive funding call seeking novel early-stage antimicrobial therapeutics to tackle AMR. In addition to funding, we are excited to support the team through access to our network of partners, advisors, mentors and enabling technologies and capabilities."