The Groningen spinout is developing antibiotics that could help overcome increasing bacterial resistance to existing drugs.
AgileBiotics, a Netherlands-based antibiotics developer spun out from University of Groningen, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from commercialisation firm Carduso Capital.
Carduso Capital manages a $35m fund called Carduso Capital Groningen NL for tech transfer from University of Groningen and University Medical Center Groningen. The fund was not, however, named explicitly in the press release.
Founded in 2017, AgileBiotics has developed an antibiotics creation platform called OxaSelect that facilitates the modification of existing compounds to build new antibiotics more quickly and cost-effectively than traditional pharmaceutical processes.
More antibiotics are needed for increasingly resilient bacterial infections such as the gram-negative bacteria known for virulent superbugs in hospital wards. There are fears failing to discover enough new antibiotics could lead to a global health emergency.
AgileBiotics was co-founded by Andreas Bastian, a former research fellow at Groningen whose work used metallo-beta-lactamase inhibitors to reinvigorate a last-resort class of antibiotics known as carbapenem in fighting multi-drug resistant bacteria.
The capital will be used for development as AgileBiotics looks to find a handful of drug candidates based on the OxaSelect platform. AgileBiotics aims to licence out successful candidates to pharmaceutical firms once they have cleared clinical phase 2 stage trials.
Triade, a commercialisation services UMCG spinout, had previously joined its investment subsidiary Stichting Hanzepoort and philanthropic vehicle G.J. Smid Fonds for AgileBiotics’ March 2017 pre-seed round, though further details were not disclosed.
