Roche launches Warp Drive antibiotic collaboration for $387m
pharmafile | October 16, 2017 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Antibiotics, Roche, biotech, drugs, pharma, pharmaceutical
Roche had tentatively begun to re-enter the antibiotic space, but it has now signalled its growing intention to move in this direction with a potential $387 million deal with Warp Drive Bio. The latter company will utilise its antibiotic discovery platform to uncover targets that Roche could take forward.
Roche will pay $87 million, upfront, for the privilege of being able to select antibiotics from a certain class and then commercialise the candidates. As is usual in this kind of deal, the potential success of the discoveries could see Warp receive a further $300 million in milestone payments.
Part of the press release announcing the deal from Warp revealed what it believes the advantage of its technology is; the biotech stated that its technology is able to discover natural product drugs that have not previously been analysed, due to technological limitations.
Warp is currently working to analyse and discover more than one hundred novel classes of potential antibiotics that have not yet been tested for human use. The company has developed a genomic database of 135,000 strains that encodes more than four million biosynthetic gene clusters, an approach that led them to discover within this database the footprint of known drugs. This enables them to target similar clusters to discover new classes of antibiotics.
“We are committed to bringing urgently needed novel antibiotic medicines to patients, and we are delighted to be collaborating with Roche in that goal,” said Laurence Reid, CEO of Warp Drive Bio. “Antimicrobial resistance is an extraordinary threat to global human health, and Warp Drive’s unique platform allows us to access a vast reservoir of uncharacterized natural products from which to identify novel antibiotics.”
Roche’s step into the space could signal a growing interest to combat the growing threat of antibiotic resistance. As the warning signs of antibiotic resistance begin to emerge, the urgency to develop new treatments is growing and likely to be incentivised, with more calls to apply the rare disease parameters for antibiotics.
Roche has clearly scented something in the area, adding Warp Drive Bio to collaborations with other companies in the space, such as Spero Therapeutics and Discuva, amongst others.
Ben Hargreaves
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