A company developing treatments for drug-resistant bacterial infections is getting a boost from the Department of Defense.
Gaithersburg, Maryland-based Adaptive Phage Therapeutics, also known as APT, said Tuesday that it the DoD had awarded it $10.2 million to fund a clinical trial to develop its personalized bacteriophage therapeutic, PhageBank.
“This is a promising step toward making phage therapy available to military and potentially non-military patients alike as a rapid and cost-effective option for multi-drug resistant bacterial infections,” APT CEO Greg Merril said in a statement. “APT’s proprietary technologies enable the rapid administration of phage therapy as a precise treatment tailored to a patient’s individual infection.”
The company completed a $7 million strategic financing in October, which included participation by Alexandria Venture Investments and an unnamed healthcare delivery network, which APT said it would use to finance Phase II development of PhageBank.
Phages are viruses that infect and kill bacteria, and APT’s scientific rationale is based on the fact that in general, a single phage strain can only infect a single bacterial strain. According to its web page, it uses genomic screening and purification of phages in its collection, identifying additional phages to use if bacteria develop resistance to them. By contrast, antibiotic drugs target multiple types of bacteria, but in recent years a growing number of drug-resistant strains have emerged.
APT’s announcement comes less than two weeks after Melinta Therapeutics became the latest antibiotics maker to collapse, as the Morristown, New Jersey-based company said Dec. 27 that it filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. Melinta manufactures antibiotics such as Baxdela (delafoxacin), Vabomere (meropenem, vaborbactam), Orbactiv (oritavancin) and Minocin (minocycline).
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Melinta was only the latest antibiotic-focused company to implode. In April of last year, Achaogen also filed for bankruptcy as anemic sales of its drug failed to keep the pace with operational costs.
While antibiotic resistance has sparked numerous media reports over the years of a “post-antibiotic era” in which anything from giving birth to a flesh wound can put people at risk of deadly infections, experts have said the biggest challenges to developing new antibiotics are often economic rather than scientific. As drugs with limited shelf lives, relatively low prices and designed for use over short periods of time, antibiotics have proven unprofitable to develop compared with expensive drugs to treat serious diseases or therapies used over the course of patients’ lifetimes.
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