Agreement to develop a new class of antibiotics

Western Australia’s Telethon Kids Institute and Boulos & Cooper Pharmaceuticals have signed a $685,000 agreement to develop what could be the first new class of antibiotics in decades.

In the last 30 years, only one fundamentally new class of antibiotics has been approved for clinical use. In this time, many strains of bacteria have now developed a strong resistance to current antibiotics, reducing treatment options for patients infected with multidrug-resistant ‘superbugs’.

The potential new class of antibiotics will exploit a different vulnerability of bacteria — making it much harder for the microorganism to escape the effects of the antibiotics. It is the invention of Dr Ramiz Boulos, a Perth scientist and founder and CEO of Boulos & Cooper Pharmaceuticals, who is now hoping to commercialise the discovery.

“This could be a completely new type of weapon in our antibiotics arsenal,” Dr Boulos said. “The preclinical findings are an exciting discovery that I believe will lead to new drugs that save thousands of lives for decades to come.

“What I see with this technology is that it has the potential to completely disrupt the antibiotic industry — it could be one of the first fundamentally new classes of antibiotics to be approved in decades.

“Following the completion of our preclinical trials over the next 12 months, we hope to proceed to clinical trials in the coming years.

“We chose the Telethon Kids Drug Discovery unit to partner with as they are one of the leading exerts with commercial experience conducting microbial research to the standard required by leading global pharmaceutical companies.”

The ‘Eureka’ moment of Dr Boulos’s discovery — showing the ‘zone of inhibition’ where bacterial growth has only been prevented around the proximity of the new antibiotic compound (white dot on the right). The discovery bears visual similarities to the original penicillin discovery by Fleming in the 1920s.

It is hoped the new class of antibiotics will be able to attack some of the biggest pathogens in the world, including:

• strains of ‘golden staph’ that no longer respond to current antibiotics;
• Clostridium difficile infection — the number one cause of diarrhoea requiring hospitalisation in Australia;
• Pseudomonas — a lung infection that kills approximately 500 people in Australia each year and over 20,000 people annually in the US.
   

Other advantages over existing antibiotics are said to include better tolerance at high dosage levels, lower cost and versatility of manufacturing, and increased stability in a wide range of environmental conditions, minimising the need for refrigeration. Professor Paul Watt, Director of Research Services and Innovation at Telethon Kids, said the institute’s Drug Discovery Unit plans to help unpack the underlying reasons why this potential drug is so effective.

“Our Drug Discovery Unit will be helping understand the mechanism of action of this exciting new drug so that it can be further optimised,” Prof Watt said. “We also hope to better understand any potential resistant mechanisms so that we can help to minimise them.

“We also aim to study how this new class could work in conjunction with existing antibiotics. We predict that simultaneous treatment with multiple classes of antibiotics targeting different vulnerabilities of the bacteria could greatly reduce the chance of resistance.

“It’s about the power of combined treatment. It becomes much harder for the bacteria to evade multiple simultaneous threats coming from different directions.”

Boulos & Cooper Pharmaceuticals is the only Australian company currently developing a new class of antibiotics. The board features a number of prominent scientists, including former Australian of the Year Professor Fiona Wood.

Top image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Sasa Komlen