Urgent Need for Resistance-Breaking Antibiotics

The substantial number of antibacterial agents identified and developed during the second half of the last century has seemingly fulfilled the requirements to combat the vast majority of common infections to a point where bacterial infections were considered to be overcome. However, the past 10 years have proven this conviction to be premature. Especially in a hospital setting, resistances against several of the most efficacious antibacterial agents have been rising constantly in the past two decades. Both Gram-positive and Gram-negative pathogens have collected a vast array of resistance mechanisms including degradative enzymes, target mutations, reduced permeation and efflux pumps actively removing antibiotics from the bacterial cell. Treatment failure due to antibiotic resistance is particularly grave for patients whose immune system is compromised, such as people with an underlying disease and patients in intensive care units. According to recent health statistics, each year about 2 million people acquire bacterial infections in U.S. hospitals alone, of which 90,000 die as a result. About 70 percent of these infections are resistant to at least one drug (IDSA, 2004).

Since many of the large pharmaceutical companies have recently abandoned antibacterial research due to economic considerations and increasingly stricter regulations, opinion leaders have expressed their concerns as to where the next generation of drugs will come from. Alarmed by the prospect that effective antibiotics may not be available to treat seriously ill patients in the near future, physicians specialized on infectious diseases emphasize the urgent medical need for novel antibacterial agents that can overcome resistance to existing therapies.  

AiCuris' mission is the development of life-saving cures for the treatment of severe Gram-positive and Gram-negative infections to ensure effective antibacterial therapeutic options for the future. The highly innovative antibacterial pipeline of AiCuris comprises several discovery programs as well as late stage preclinical candidates targeting multi-resistant pathogens. All projects are based on novel compound classes with unprecedented mechanisms of action in diverse target areas and without cross-resistance to marketed antibiotics. Due to their novel mechanisms the compounds demonstrate remarkable effectiveness against multi-resistant clinical isolates. Thus, they are ideally suited as resistance-breaking antibiotics for the treatment of severe infections in the hospital environment such as nosocomial pneumonia, complicated tissue and organ infections, and bacteraemia.