BIOASTER announced the signature of a collaboration agreement with Pherecydes Pharma, a French Biotechnology company, with the objective of discovering lytic bacteriophages, to be developed into a pharmaceutical solution to treat bacterial infections including those caused by multidrug resistant strains.
This project, called PhagUTI, is a unique opportunity for the partners to capitalize on BIOASTER’s unique expertise on pre-clinical models and the extensive experience of Pherecydes on the selection, characterization and production of bacteriophages.
In the last few decades, antibiotics have turned life-threatening diseases into short-term disorders and have had a major positive impact on public health and the global economy. Today, however, this progress is under serious threat due to the rapidly increasing emergence of antibiotic resistance.
Worldwide, an estimated 700,000 resistant infections occur in hospitals annually. A recently published report forecasts that this could lead to 10 million deaths per year by 2050 and a cumulative cost over $100 trillion. Moreover, the widespread resistance to antibiotics threaten most common medical and surgical procedures in modern medicine that would no longer be possible.
The increasing threat of resistance to existing antibiotics has been the major driver of the renewed interest in bacteriophages treatment, phages being the natural predators of bacteria.
E. coli is the main pathogen responsive for Urinary Tract Infections (UTI), in particular catheter-associated UTI (CAUTI) and Pyelonephritis. The objective of this project is to demonstrate in vivo the efficacy of phage therapy to treat urinary tract E. coli infections.
“This collaborative program illustrates very well BIOASTER’s ambition: bringing together partners’ complementary expertise for accelerating innovation towards new effective solutions for the patients”, said Nathalie Garçon, CEO & CSO of BIOASTER. “We are very proud to be part of this exciting project with Pherecydes that will generate new avenues for alternative treatments of multi-drug resistant bacterial infections.”
“This project will be an important step forward for phage therapy and a new hope for patients”, commented Guy-Charles Fanneau de la Horie, CEO of Pherecydes pharma. “We are looking forward to working with BIOASTER on this fascinating project”, he added.